Asian-Camera-Syndrome

I once heard a joke that Asians will take pictures of everything. EVERYTHING. Especially tourists. They take pictures of everything, such as exit signs. If they ever get lost, they can always look through their pictures to find where the exit is! [I know it's not funny retold by me, much less retold via blog entry, but just go with it]

Over the years, I've observed that tours that are organized by Asian companies love to visit campuses of higher education. At least whenever I was at Stanford, there would always be Asians hopping off their tour buses and taking pictures of everything in sight. Apparently they love coming to USC too because I've seen groups of tourists all dressed up in their touristy clothes and following their tour guide who holds some flashy flag or whatnot. ANYWAY, so the other day I was walking past the cinema building and witnessed the following:

Caption: Asian guy takes picture of random sign. He was really into it. Like, no joke, he was really excited taking this picture.

I cracked up and laughed out loud. Why? Because it wasn't an exit sign. The sign was:

Seriously, why the hell would you take a picture of this sign?! No Smoking, Bicycles, Rollerblades, or Skateboard Riding. First of all, you're a tourist probably from China. I assume the tour company isn't having its clients bike, blade, or board around. The only part of this sign that actually applies to you is the No Smoking part. But is the concept of "No Smoking" really that hard to grasp or that intriguing? No, it isn't. He must have a problem. I'll name it Asian-Camera-Syndrome.

It just seemed so absurd as to why anyone would take a picture of this sign. Watching him take multiple pictures of this sign greatly amused me because it reminded me about the whole Asians-take-pictures-of-everything issue. However, watching him made me realize that I do it too. I currently have 358 MG left on my hard drive, probably because of the millions of pictures I take. Whenever I want to take a picture of scenery or random flowers or even post-its for that matter [yes, I once camera whored post-its], I take a million shots of the same thing. So I admit it. I have a problem. I too have Asian-Camera-Syndrome.

I can't figure out why I do this [or why other people do it]. I don't mean to be racist or anything by saying that this is what Asians do. In fact, I'm not sure whether or not other Asians do this at all. Or if non-Asians do this. Do they?

Anyway, thank you man who loves taking pictures of random signs. Fifteen seconds of watching you allowed me to discover my own problem. And provided amusement. I think my hard drive will forgive me if I ever get around to purging all the random pictures. I should do it soon. I have gigs worth of pictures of blades of grass and insignificant looking clouds.

Why Try to Change Me - Fiona Apple

I love this song.

The video has scenes from The Nightmare Before Christmas, which I have not seen in forever. But I love Tim Burton, I can't wait for Alice in Wonderland to come out!!! I definitely want to go to the midnight premiere. I wonder if there's going to be a fancy premiere with red carpet and everything here in LA. If you happen to stumble upon information, let me know!

[Edit: Nevermind! The premiere is in the UK. I wouldn't mind going...anyone want to fly me there? Anyway, sucks that I would go out of the way to go to Alice and Wonderland's premiere but it's in another country. Sigh...]

Happy New Years and Valentines Day!

:) Happy New Years to all my lovely Asians. And [OOPS I DIDN'T KNOW I WAS RACIST.] everyone else, if you so choose to celebrate!

Happy Valentines to all my lovelies. Especially the tallest and most handsome Takahashi brother. CH&JS&CG&GT4eva. The Mormon Way, of course.

Hope you have a wonderful day! I love you!

Sarcasm and Meeting an Old Man

This made me laugh. Well, I mean, it's really NOT funny. But because it's not funny, it actually is. I used to think that I was pretty sarcastic. That side of me has slowly but surely disappeared. Perhaps this is a good thing. I guess when sarcasm isn't directed at you in a hostile situation, it can be fun.

HMMM...well, I guess I'm still sarcastic to certain people. Like Miss Lee. And my mother.

On another note, I was at a master's dinner today and the guest speaker was Dr. Sidney Harman. He has a wikipedia page. Legit.

Anyway, he's an extremely successful business man and entrepreneur. His resume and list of achievements is quite long. Well, you figured it would be since he is 91 years old. UH he looks, and is, physically well as if he were an extremely healthy active 63 year old. My hypochondriac-yet-actually-healthy-70-something-year-old grandmother wouldn't stand a chance against him. Heck, maybe I wouldn't. Seriously, this guy is amazing. At 91 years old, he's teaching, flying around, doing business, maintaining a lovely marriage with his wife Congresswoman Jane Harman. He was so cute when she called in the middle of his talk and he picked up just to say hi :)

I just thought that I'd put this out there because meeting a cute 91 year old man who will probably live another 30 years made my day. He remembers WWII. Simply amazing :)

Whatever happened to bake sales?

To begin, I'd like to declare that this blog is simply for random musings. I'm not quite sure where I want to go with this, but for now it will be...random. And just that. So hi there! Come back and read as you wish and leave a comment to amuse me please :)

Lovely memories from freshman year of high school: I distinctly remember loving getting out of 7th period [ha! what a joke...how did I ever make it through such a long school day?!] and being super excited because every week, on multiple days, clubs would be outside of the auditorium after school selling random sweets, snacks and drinks to the delight of the fat-kid-who-loves-cake inside of me. Oh wait, that's outside of me too. Hehe, anyway...so while it was common to grab a pearl milk tea at jacked up prices, it was even more common to see clubs having bake sales. Now, these bake sales disappeared during what must have been my sophomore or junior year.

As part of CHEF Club, I was so excited to be on leadership and organize hosts of bake sales! I love baking! I love getting other people fat around me and consuming the flour and sugar I lovingly tossed into the oven! Baking cheesecake was our THING for club day! So why in the name of Mister Bunbury did this end? Well my friends, IT happened. IT, being bureaucracy. Red tape from administration informing me that we could not make our own cheesecake for club day, and could not have a bake sale fundraiser. Apparently they were worried we were going to poison the poor kids...or something along those lines. Maybe around finals time, they wouldn't have minded if we did. [I kid you...]

So, this was pretty upsetting to me in high school...all I wanted to do was bake cookies, make homemade lemonade and feed it to the masses.

Fast forward to today. I heard it again. I was mildly day dreaming [while still listening of course] during announcements at the end of choir practice and I heard the following utterance of blasphemy: "We will be selling Diddy Riese cookies instead of baking our own cookies for the bake sale fundraiser because apparently the school won't allow us to sell things we bake ourselves."

I'm sorry, WHAT? For some reason this brought back all the sorrow that I had from high school from not being able to cook and bake our own things to sell. We're not going to poison anyone, we promise.

I'm upset because all this red tape detracts from the fun of bonding while baking, and being proud about being selling something you made by yourself! When we were kids, my brother and I used to sell homemade lemonade on the sidewalk at 25 cents a cup. And aside from that one time that my brother decided he didn't like his lemonade with sugar and decided to omit this key ingredient, I was proud that people enjoyed what we made. In today's world we rely so much on manufactured goods [and don't get me wrong, I love Diddy Riese] that we don't recognize the sugary goodness that can be made by our own hands. Instead we shell out a few dollars for some gas and store bought cookies.

So to everyone involved in this evil attempt to destroy the classic bake sale, I beg you to stop! I promise to bake you cookies and they won't make you sick :)