Life is Beautiful

Small World

It's a small world after all, and an uneventful one at that.  So there’s this other girl at my work and it turns out that she’s a girl I knew way back from elementary school.  And I mean way back like in 2nd or 3rd grade when I was a triathlete and ruled the playground during recess.  I dominated the handball courts, reigned as Four Square king, and weathered tether balls with haymakers so devastating you might as well have just called me Rocky. 

I was also fat.  That's probably the only real thing out of all that, the fact that I really was really fat, and there was no mistaking that.  Yeah I was fat…and the only Rocky in me was rocky road.  I sat on the swings by myself with cookie crumbs on my shirt and smeared chocolate stuck in between my teeth as I watched the skinny kids play on the blacktop.  But hey, at least I could swing higher than them.

Anyways, so back to my chance encounter with an old buddy.  I don’t know if she really was my buddy, in fact, I think we were enemies.  She had the same last name as me and that disgusted us both, enough to make us gag whenever someone asked if we were brother and sister.  I never understood why it offended her so much to the point where it seemed as if she wanted to destroy anyone who thought we were related.  And I’m sure she possessed a burning desire to slam me against the lockers and steal my milk money, but I’m also sure she just wanted an excuse to touch me and flirt with me.  She called it hatred, but I knew it was really lust that fueled her passion …boy was she crazy.  To tell you the truth, I wasn’t that flattered either to be affiliated with some girl with “koodies”.  Koodies?  No thanks, I would have rather eaten my kudos bar.  Besides, for her to be even remotely associated with me should have been an honor…she must have been confused, or crazy, or both.  I mean come on, I was a pretty funny guy.  And humor coupled with my chubbiness made me jolly and likeable.  That must have been it, she probably liked me and was bitter that I didn’t give up the goodies to her and told her to “keep on looking cuz they stay in the jar.”  But hey,  I definitely wasn’t gonna give up the goodies for koodies.  Anyways, with a rivalry like that, we might as well have just been siblings.

Ok so really this time, back to my chance encounter.  So we never really interacted much throughout elementary and middle school and afterwards I escaped to a different city, so I never thought I’d ever talk to her again. And I didn’t…until we just so happened to end up working at the same company.  The company’s called CGI-AMS.  Who? Exactly.   I still don’t even know what the CGI part stands for, it’s some french acronym but I don’t know french, so what’s that got to do with me?  So as if ending up at some company that I've never heard of wasn’t enough, I end up working with an old classmate from back in the days that I never heard from.

But anyways, when we saw each other, we didn’t run across the office with arms wide open, leap over desks and chairs, and catch each other in the air in an embrace of rapture as if we were long lost best friends, because we really weren’t.  It was hardly a breathtaking reunion, if a reunion at all since she didn't even remember who I was at first, which really pissed me off.  I obviously didn’t expect her to recognize me of course, since I underwent a dramatic metamorphosis from a chubby caterpillar to a dazzling butterfly.  But she could have at least remembered that we went to the same school and shared a tumultuous history, unless I traumatized her so bad that she blocked out that memory.

It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.  It was supposed be like how it is on those “Look At Me Now!” talk shows where some guy who used to be a loser/geek or fatty comes back 20 years later to flaunt his new look and impress the girl he had a crush on.  Well I definitely had a new look and she definitely wasn't my crush, but I definitely wanted to strut my newfound goods.  I look drastically different from how I did in elementary school and that should have elicited somewhat of a shocked reaction from her. 

But she tried to play it off all nonchalantly like “Oh you went to Travis too?”  Are you kidding me?! Way to rain on my party…what a bust.  But maybe she was just trying to act all calm and cool and unruffled by my resurrection in my new form…she was always trying to be part of the cool crowd, but she never made it like I did.  Or maybe I just made her so nervous she didn’t know what to do with herself.  Whatever it was, it was extremely awkward and abnormal.  Anyways, I’m sure she remembered.  How could you not remember me?  I was the fatty.  I was easily noticeable back then, but hardly memorable I guess.  I was a sweet kid, but the memory itself, if anything, is bittersweet…just like the chocolate I stuffed my face with.

Currently Listening X&Y By Coldplay see related

- Track 11: Swallowed In The Sea

Miss Me?

So I finished up college and all that, and after all that much ado about nothing, I moved back home and just stayed there.  I didn't go backpacking in Europe and get to stay in hostels where I could befriend other wide-eyed wanderers, or even emerge from a pub drunk so I could haplessly meander into the red-light district and accidentally stumble into a brothel.  I didn't travel to a secluded jungle and mingle with the local tribes or dance around a fire, or go to the amazon rainforest to eat exotic fruits and encounter the bizarre fauna.  Nope, I didn't do any traveling abroad or wild adventuring.  I just stayed home and sat there.

And no, I am not looking for credit or sympathy.  According to Richard's xanga entry, we are all actors in a play we call life, and I am a drama king (according to Christine, the melodramatic queen herself) so I see it only fit to overdramatize my life. 

Despite the shortage of festivities and lack of celebrity treatment that accompanied the conclusion of my college career, it was still one of the best feelings in the world.  I didn't have to worry anymore about midterms, finals, homework, or going to class.  I didn't have to worry about anything, I was done.  I had all the free time I wanted.  Soon though, it became one of the worst feelings in the world.  I had too much free time.  I had no idea what the hell I was gonna do all day at home.  Life got pretty boring, pretty fast.  On an EKG reading, my life would probably be a flat line, with no peaks of excitement.  If it were a movie, my life would definitely not be an action movie (side note:  I wanna go on MTV's MADE and be made into an Action Hero, where I calmly enter a narcotics safe house, pull out my double berettas in a sudden movement so as to flare out the sides of my long black trenchcoat, and unload total carnage until it's all done and silent, and all you hear are the white doves flying off into the distance as I wipe the stains off my black sunglasses and leave as nonchalantly as I came with a maniacal smile on my unflinching face).

So my day would basically consist of spending countless hours online, chatting, browsing, and what not.  Once I got tired of that, I would go watch TV for hours until I got tired of that, after which I had no other choice but to go back online.  I got pretty good at switching back and forth between the two events and tricking my brain into thinking it was doing something different each time.  Even though this was extremely boring, I was amazed at myself at how well I could make the time go by just by sitting on my ass and being in a vegetative state.  The highlights of my day would be going to work out, where I would finally get out of the house, or watching Laker games on days they played, but most of they times they lost, turning what was supposed to be a higlight into a complete waste of time.  Yeah, that was my life.

In addition, I didn't have a job yet, and that was really worrying me.  Most of the time I spent online was looking for jobs, until my job basically became looking for jobs.  I wasn't getting many replies and any interviews that I did get didn't lead to anything else.  I was pretty down, and these were depressing times.  I had no stability in my life.  I'd go to Indian casinos and test my luck there, but I would lose each time.  Speaking of Indian casinos, there was this one time when I went to Pechanga, and there was a guy who won $15,000 playing blackjack.  It was insane, and what was crazier was the way this guy was playing.  He was drunk and played every hand exactly the way you aren't supposed to play it, and he knew it too, but he'd bet big and win.  It was comedy.  This guy was a real character though, he wasn't a boisterous drunk at all, he was a smooth drunk and casually smoked cigarettes as he played his hands.  He kinda looked like Johnny Knoxville and he wore his pants low, so that you could clearly see his ass crack as he was sitting, almost as if he was showing it off on purpose.  I'm sure he knew, but he didn't care, he was winning a shitload of money and I'm sure the pit bosses and security guys thought he was a real jackass.  But man, did he play with style.  Anyways, in the end he cleaned out most of the dealer's chips, and they wouldn't restock the table with more chips.  So he walked away with about 15 grand, and even tipped the dealer $300!  Damn, maybe I should become a dealer.

Yeah, so anyway, back to my uneventful story.  I had no job and I was losing money (in addition to losing another thing that was a major part of my life, which we don't need to go into).  Times were rough, and it reminded me of a line from a Naughty By Nature song, where it goes "If for not bad luck, I would have none." 

But anyway, in the end, my luck improved, and I finally did get a job at an IT consulting company in downtown LA, and I'm gonna be moving to Monterey Park to be closer. Yay!

To tell you the truth, I've been bored many times in my life, but I've recently reached new lows of boredom, which have caused me to do flagrant acts that are out of character, such as creating this xanga.  I tried very hard to fight it, and tried numerous times to do other useless things before resorting to this, but I just couldn't put it off anymore.  I've realized, however, that boredom, does in fact allow you to be productive, i.e. productive in unproductive things, such as spending hours modifying the look & feel of my xanga in hopes of making it look awesome, only to end up with a final look that looks similar to how it did in the beginning.

So I finally finished up school and graduated from college, and I gotta tell you, it was pretty damn anticlimactic.  You know those times when you’re out with a bunch of friends walking out on the streets looking sharp, and random people that pass by shout out to you, “Yo, where’s the party at?” cuz they think ur heading over to somewhere poppin.  Well this was one of those times, but this time I was the one asking “Where’s the party at?”  I mean, I just turned in the last final that I would ever take at UCLA.  This was it.  This was my last hurrah, my swan song.  I was done.  I finally delivered my coup de grace to the engineering beast that took 4 years and one quarter to slay.  Man, I was ready to pour the Chandon and drop it like it’s hot.  But there was to be none of that.  There were no party poppers, no streamers, no confetti, no fireworks.  I finished the final lap, but there were no cheering fans or marching band section, there wasn’t even an actual finish line for me to cross and break through.  So much for a victory lap.  I made my exit dance to no applause.