Composed Elements

I think I’ve been really tired lately. My comebacks have been getting worse and I’ve been stuttering a lot too.

The other day while I was driving, this poorly fixed-up Honda cut me off on the freeway. I responded with, “What? You think you have a n-n-n-nice car?” My friend, who was sitting in the passenger seat, laughed at me and said “N-n-n-nice!”

No, I’m not talking about a baby Guile from Street Fighter.  I was sitting in my apartment yesterday afternoon watching Arrested Development when I heard a couple of loud booming sounds on my ceiling.  The only thing I could think of was that somebody dropped a couch or refrigerator on my roof.  But that idea didn’t make sense, so I edged over to the other side of the room just in case my ceiling would collapse.  Later when I met my friend downstairs, he told me he heard other people complaining about the boom as well.  Must’ve been a heavy couch.  Then I saw an article today about the Space shuttle Endeavour landing at the Edwards Air Force Base and causing a sonic boom over LA. 

I asked my coworker if he had heard the boom as well.

ME: Did you hear that sonic boom yesterday?
COWORKER: Yea I did. That was the shuttle landing.
ME: Did you know that ahead of time?
COWORKER: No, at first I thought someone fell off the roof so I went outside to check if anybody was hurt. Then I realized I heard two booms, so I figured it was a shuttle landing, because you get one boom from the front engine and the other from the back. Then I looked online and I was right.

I felt like a country bumpkin. Maybe it is common knowledge that shuttles make sonic boom boom sounds. It reminded me of the time my family first experienced an earthquake. We had just moved from Wisconsin where there weren’t any earthquakes and before that, my parents lived in other countries that didn’t have earthquakes either. When the ground started shaking, my whole family was utterly confused. My mom told us to run outside and grab onto a pole. So there we were, all six of us, each holding onto a pole, wondering why nobody else was outside doing the same.

This was my all time favorite quote from my friend.  She couldn’t remember the name of Launchpad from that cartoon “Darkwing Duck.”

“Wasn’t his name Horatio? Wait…I mean Horace…”

She recently confessed to me that she said “Horace” after “Horatio” just in case she was wrong with the first guess.

My old roommates and I used to keep a running list of the dumb things we would say. The first day we did that, we filled up a page of quotes. Last night we were hanging out and decided to document these moments again. Here are a few highlights:

Looking at the AT&T building.
“Oh, I thought that AT&T sign was the moon.”

After a girl slips and falls in the rain, in all seriousness, my friend said:
“Was she wearing rollerblades?”
Later on…
“It was sure slippery when she fell.”

I was just looking at some of the pictures taken at my sister’s wedding banquet a couple of years ago and came across one where my brother and I were dancing in front of everyone there.  My sister and her husband wanted everyone to start dancing and urged my brother to start it off.  He made me go up with him because he didn’t feel like doing this in front of 800 people alone.  So, we pretty much did whatever dance we could think of.  I did my best horrible fake dancing moves as a joke for a couple of minutes and then sat down.  I had paid my dues.

A few days later, my mom asked me, “Where did you learn those moves?”  I was like, “What are you talking about?  I was just joking when I was dancing out there.”  She said her friends were so impressed by the dancing my brother and I did that they wanted me to teach them how to dance.  My mom looked really proud of me.  I felt bad for them – if they thought my moves were great, what did that say about theirs??

One of my friends is moving to Alaska in a couple of weeks. During this time, he has found out that there are still a lot of people out there that don’t know where Alaska is. When he told his friend he was moving to Anchorage, his friend replied with, “Wow! You’re moving to Canada?!” He got that from two different people. The pronounciation of Anchorage seems to be difficult to master as well. His tattoo artist said, “That’s cool that you’re moving to Unkorage.”

America’s Best Value Inn.

Yep, that’s where my friends and I stayed at while we were in San Diego. We wanted some place cheap and near the downtown Gas Lamp district. The name of the motel itself already gave us an idea of what it was offering: “best value” means cheap and cheap is what we paid for.

The neighborhood it was in didn’t look as bad as I thought it would be (but my expectations were already pretty low). It was in the middle of nowhere and across the street, there was a party with loud house music playing. When we checked in, my friend half jokingly asked if we could get a safe room. The woman said “sure,” but, of course our room was on the side that was not facing the street, but rather the ghetto. When we saw our room, my friend instantly said, “WTF? I asked for a safe room!”

We decided not to leave our bags in our room after noticing that somebody had already crow-barred the screen window. Upon seeing that, we tried locking our window, but then realized the lock was broken because that too had been crow-barred. We decided we could take shifts watching the window or sleep with one eye open.

When our taxi driver dropped us off, I asked him how bad our neighborhood was. This was our conversation:

TAXI DRIVER: I would never drive out here if I had a choice.
ME: Are you serious? Is it really that bad?
TAXI DRIVER: You see that bridge next to your place? That’s where all the homeless people sleep. Lots of crime, lots of drugs in this area. One of the worst areas.
ME: Oh.
TAXI DRIVER: It’s really not safe here. You should come sleep over at my place tonight.
ME: No, thank you. =/

On my first day back to work from my weeklong trip to China, I found out that I brought back a Chinese virus with me.  No, it wasn’t SARS or the bird flu.  I overheard one of my coworkers complaining to the IT department that he somehow received a virus on his computer that kept playing Chinese pop music.  And it would play a different song every time.  Really, it did – I heard it.  Apparently this virus did other things too…

Coworker:  There’s also the sound of this girl moaning.
IT guy:  OK…
Coworker:  No, really.  It sounds like “uhhh uhhh.”
IT guy:  [Silence]

Last night I dreamt that I was dating Obama…during a time of pirate warfare. It was kind of like that “Waterworld” movie with Kevin Costner where everyone stopped living on land. We were on a big ship and he was still wearing a suit while pirates were shooting cannons at us. He was quite charming. What a strange dream…

I was so hungry today on my drive to work and didn’t have time to stop by and pick up food anywhere. The worst thing was that I had to drive behind a lunch truck for a good portion of my commute, with the scent of bean burritos wafting into my vents.