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Written February 12th, 2010; I never finished until now because I lost my username and password!

It was a cold, dark night at  2:00 AM. My friend was suspicious of her boyfriend not being true to his words that he was to stay at home instead of hanging out “with some friends.” Having had a long talk with her and considering alternatives to finding out if her boyfriend was really telling the truth, we inconveniently decided that we would drive over to his neighborhood to see if he was home. Inconvenient why you may ask? It was a 40 minute drive.

So we went. I drove her. On the drive there, we were still talking about her boyfriend and his inconsistent words and actions. Time flew by. I took the exit to the area, and we drove to his neighborhood. We figured that to hide our identities in case he was home, we would both put on our hoods from our sweaters.

As I turned into his neighborhood, I noticed a white car on the other side of the street just stopped at the stop sign with the headlights brightly on. I continued into the neighborhood, and after circling around once with my friend scouting the cars, we deduced that her boyfriend was indeed telling the truth: he was home sleeping like a baby. So we decided to leave.

Little did we know it was easier said than done.

As I turned around and crept up the street we came from, I noticed the same white luxury car with the headlights on. It was still at the stop sign, just stopped. My friend and I were being paranoid and were thinking… what if it was her boyfriend and friends in that car and they were snooping on us snooping on them? So I took a right at the light, but then I U-turned back to drive past the white car for my friend to glance to see if  it was her boyfriend. We drove past. We glanced. It wasn’t.

This is where it gets interesting.

As I drove away, I looked into my rearview mirror and noticed the white car finally broke its catatonic state and began to move. Not only did it move, it turned and moved towards us. Towards us it drove, towards us it followed. Just to be sure they were following us, I increased my foot pressure every so slightly to augment our car’s acceleration. They did the same.

Looking at my friend, I said to her they were following us. Fearing impending doom, I thought fast and reacted quickly: I turned right into what I thought was a shopping center to see if they would still follow, and to evade them if needed. Notice I said reacted quickly, not smartly.

“Where are you going? This is worse, this is worse!” my friend exclaimed.

“What? What are you talking about, I’m trying to lose them!”

“But it’s a dead end, it’s closed, this is a dark alley!”

Dark alley it was. But dead end it wasn’t. Thank goodness. It definitely looked like a dead end but I didn’t even notice until we were in the plaza. All I was thinking of was trying to run away. The plaza wasn’t really a shopping plaza, but one of those corner fast food places that had very narrow passages that BARELY fit your car! I squeezed through quickly and carelessly, luckily not damaging my car. Looked in the rearview mirror and the car FOLLOWED US ALL THE WAY THROUGH.

At this point, we stared at each other as I drove away, knowing very well our faces were just expressing WTF to each other.

Faster and faster, I gassed my car into the residential, making squeaky turns and circling around the neighborhood like a juggling clown. After about 5 or 6 neighborhood blocks, we were making for a straight road. In the distance we saw a wall blocking our path, and behind us the car was still speeding towards us, as if ready to pull out Uzis and unload bullets on our asses.

“Help, help! Help me!” I said to my passenger.

“What do you want me to do?! What?!” she exclaimed.

I slammed the gas pedal harder and sped towards the wall faster. I saw the look of my passenger, she was obviously thinking I was going to run the car straight through the wall. However, I was just panicking and didn’t know what to do. I finally slammed the brakes and stopped the car before hitting the wall, and we both were looking at each other like, “Is this the end?”

We turned around slowly. They were gone.

So we drove home.

 

Never again.

The Two-Faced System

I’m really tired of over-studying. Not just over-studying, but over-studying for a class that I probably won’t have much use for in the future.

First of all, I know that to get a good grasp of the material then we should study everything. I understand that the concept everyone has of “study only what’s on the test” is bad, but when you got hundreds of detailed pages to memorize, we should be given somewhat of an idea of what’s important.

But that’s not the problem. My professors did give us an idea of what’s important. They did tell us we needed to know certain drugs, certain mechanisms, certain disease states. They did a great job of telling us and guiding us what to focus on, what to learn, what to know for the exam or even in clinical settings when we have our degree and are working health professionals.

What’s my problem, then?

Liars.

Professors are liars. Granted, not all of them are and some really care for their students. However, the ones I have encountered only put up that false front to gain our trust and give them good professor ratings. “He’s nice”, “oh he told us what’s going to be on the midterm”, “he’s doing the same for the final”, etc etc. Really, now? Are professor ratings that important to them? Do those ratings ever even cause professors to lose their jobs when they already have tenure? What is the reasoning behind their madness? Why pretend to help us, guide us, answer our questions, when in the end they are just going to throw us a curveball and ask us stuff that we have never seen in our lives? What’s the point? Do these professors just enjoy educational massacre?

Education should be about learning. Not ratings.

Crawfish

Crawfish smells but it tastes so good. Too bad I can’t have any because my white braces would stain from the seasoning. Only about two years left with this… FML

Alongside Screwed Up Rules

Upper management makes rules and rules and rules. You have to do this a certain way because it’s faster, you have to do that a certain way because it’s nicer, you have to keep doing this at this pace because it’s easier. Seriously, who the hell are you guys to even make those rules for us? Are you put IN our situations? Are you working ALONGSIDE with us? No. You are sitting in your nice decked out glass offices at some corporate skyscraper building in downtown wearing your black-gives-me-a-sense-of-self-importance business suits brainstorming unsupported ideas of rules that you think would work for the best of the company. Who the hell did you ask? NO ONE. How are you going to run the company well with no damn input from your employees on their work environments?

Rant

Man, it’s 3:34 AM as I write this and I am to be awake in 5 hours to get ready for work. I just don’t get how people do it. For me, I am struggling so much with work and school and a position in an organization, but other people bave 2 jobs and are presidents of more than a few organizations and still get high grades! I just don’t get it, how do they manage time so well? I guess they don’t spend their limited time going on facebook or writing pointless blogs…

Damn myself and this blog.

iPhone Water Damage!

So, this didn’t happen to my phone, but it happened to my friend’s phone.

She dropped her phone in the toilet for ONE second. Now the phone still works, but putting in a SIM card would yield a “no sim installed” message that would loop over and over. Anyone know how to fix this problem?

And so it begins…

Ah, first day of class was today. What a great day. I got to see some friends I haven’t seen all summer, and the 2 classes I had today were pretty interesting. It looks to be a good year, with a lot to learn and a lot of fun to be had. Still, stressing is futile to avoid. I’m already stressed out from studying today after dinner and cleaning the apartment. Some interesting things happened here and there.

Random 1: Quite a few people commented on me looking like I lost a lot of weight. That’s always a plus. Maybe it’s the combination of working out and getting braces and lack of eating due to depression that made me lose weight…

Random 2: After having dinner with a bunch of classmates, I went home to my apartment and my roommate found a lizard in her bathroom rug. It looked dead, and we were sad because we thought she stepped on it and killed it. She picked it up and left it on the bathroom counter and went to update her Facebook status while I tried to get a good camera shot of the lizard. Guess what? It was just in its freezing mechanism of fear, because after she left it alone, the lizard started to run its head into the corner wall. I called my roommate back in to watch, and then she went back in her room to update her status again. Then we picked up the lizard and let it go.

Random 3: Me and my roommate are getting random bug bites and we have no idea where it’s coming from. It only started yesterday and it’s getting worse today. We’re thinking they’re bug bites, and we hope it’s only bug bites and not something worse.

Random 4: I spent 5 hours editing and updating my notes for one class today.

Random 5: I hate people don’t know where to draw the line when playing pranks on people. My pocket was iced with my iPhone inside it. Hence I am updating this blog from my actual computer this time.

Ah, it’s 3:30 AM and I haven’t slept yet. I need to get some rest before class tomorrow… even though class starts at 1 PM. Good night bloggers.

Versus: Forgetting and Acceptance

What’s a difficult thing to do is to forget about someone that you’ve grown so close to. Under the circumstances, I had to try to forget, but it has not worked. It’s definitely harder when everything around you reminds you about that person because you have shared to many experiences together with them. Whether it be music, humor, movies, shows, malls, theme parks, cooking, walking the dogs, elegant restaurants, etc., there is always going to be some remnant around you that will remind you of that person. Even “drinking to forget” can’t work, because drinking is just another memory and event shared.

It seems to me now that maybe forgetting isn’t what I should attempt to do after all. It seems that cherishing those memories is a better course of action to take. Since everything reminds me of her, then nothing would make me forget her. Why attempt futility when you can embrace history? The best thing to do is accept it and move on.

Easier said than done.

Tuts my Barreh (Touch My Body)

I feel sorry for him, but I can’t stop laughing…

Where is our Privacy?

I was looking through my old blogs and I found an interesting post I wrote in 2005. Everything following this sentence is from that post.

Where is our Privacy?

Napster started it all. File sharing flourished when it was released. Music lovers shared a large variety of sounds among each other and other music lovers around the world. The MP3 format became widely used and became a household word. Custom cds were being produced in higher numbers than ever before. What joy it brought to our little happy hearts.

Enter the RIAA. Enter old and dying music groups like Metallica. Enter courts. Our love for the sharing of music was being threatened. The RIAA and bands like Metallica started cracking down on Napster and its users. Soon, the mildstone of the MP3 age was sieged and destroyed. Even though it came back, it was never the same. We all share a sad loss in our hearts.

Nonetheless, despite the efforts of RIAA, many imitators, and some becoming superior to the original, emerged. Radiated through every part of the world was each region’s own little version of Napster. We got Morpheus, Kazaa, iMesh, Edonkey, Emule, BearShare, Filetopia, Direct Connect, Grouper, and the like. Our strength, our love for music sharing and file sharing in general… it spawned a whole new generation of programs. These 2nd generation Napsters proved that there was no stopping the file sharing of the public…or so it seemed.

RIAA, MPAA, along with other associations across the globe united and took a stand against the 2nd generation spawn of file-sharers. A battle ensued, and it was bravely and fiercely fought. However, in the end, one by one the 2nd generation was losing. One by one we lost another league of sharers. One by one, we felt more loss in our hearts. However, this was a mere battle in a grandscale war. File-sharing came back once, what is there to prevent it from coming back again?

Bittorrent. The pinnacle of the file-sharing legacy and the basis of what is legendary known as Suprnova.org. This was a mode of file-sharing that was recently introduced a couple years ago that caught on in a surprisingly quick fashion. It could resume files, download from multiple people at once, and was individually uploaded. This meant no central server, which meant lower risk of getting pounded by the RIAA and MPAA. For what seemed like a long period of time, this was our main means of sharing. It seemed to be a long period of time, that is, until its demise.

The crackdown on BT was a tricky one, because it meant that they would have to be breaking the law in order to arrest others that are breaking the law. That is why they went and attacked the trackers, specifically Suprnova, the then biggest provider of torrents. Although small sites went down first, it was not until Suprnova went down that hope was given up. Now we sit here at a loss of one of our biggest proponents to file-sharing.

What does this have to do with privacy?

Should we not be able to share files with our friends and family as we do when we visit them and play the cd/movie in their players? Should we not be able to create our own custom mixed cds for parties and themed-dances? Should we not be able to express our freedom of doing whatever we want to whatever we buy? If we do not make a profit out of it, there should not be any problem with it. Artists already lose a lot of money by getting only a certain percentage of money from their album distributers (the RIAA). Yet, this is being made a big deal and we are being invaded of our privacy and being arrested for what we do in private.

Shouldn’t what we do in our own households be left to us? The laws over anything do not pertain to household individuals. By attributing those laws to what we do in our homes is not only unlawful but it also breaks another law which is the right to our own privacy.

This privacy issue doesn’t have to just be with file-sharing. We see this today with laws such as The Patriot Act. Tapping into phones and listening in on conversations so that we can lock people up in jail before they commit a crime is absurd. Invasion of privacy. We lose our freedom of speech. We will have to be careful what we say. We can’t joke around anymore when we are with friends. We will become an emotionless people. What makes us human will be taken from us, “to preserve the better of the nation”. What point is there in living if we lose what makes us human? What point is there to be in a nation that takes away our human right to merely “better” the nation?