if there’s one thing i enjoy about the office, it’s that everyone’s always looking for an excuse to throw a party.

somebody’s transferring out of the department! party. somebody’s getting married! party. someone’s retiring! party. someone lost her keys! party.

this, of course, is a good thing. a party isn’t a party without food and while it ain’t exactly dinin’ at the Ritz, it’s FREE.

ah…what a beautiful word.

so here i am, eating my complimentary lunch of burnt “simulated hotdogs” and bland, discolored pasta and i don’t even know what the heck we’re celebrating.

and i’m probably going to have explosive diarrhea tonight.

woe is me! my precious mp3 player is broken!

AAAAAARRRRRRRGH!!!

so i was spacing out on the train again this morning and almost missed my stop. in my haste to get up out of my seat and jump off the train, it fell onto the ground with a “click clack clack” that has been playing on repeat in my brain for the past few hours.

“MY LITTLE PRETTY!!!” i screamed.

but alas, it was too late. i was already in danger of not making my stop so i quickly scooped up the fallen one and jumped off the train.

*sigh* i hope there was a warranty on this thing.

ah, monday mornings.

nothing beats getting up while it’s still dark outside, riding the train for an hour and then walking to work. unless, of course, it’s raining and the wartorn sidewalks are littered with deep, cubicle-sized puddles. then as you walk into the building, a surly female version of Wayne Knight welcomes you to the office not unlike Cerberus ushering damned souls through the bloody gates of hell.

on a lighter, not-relating-to-eternal-suffering note, this past weekend was le bomb. i like weekends. now, how many fingers am i holding up?

so there’s this great statue on the south side. hands outstretched to the heavens, it lords over the land with unchallenged authority.

then you take a closer look at the sign it’s holding.

i seriously wonder what city hall was thinking when they ordered the statue.

drunk1: yo, dude dude dude…we should, like, totally give it AN AWESOME NAME, dude!
drunk2: huh huh huh huh huh huh…duuuuuuude, bro! that’s like, an AWESOME IDEA.
drunk1: dude, I KNOW! oh yeah, dude? we’re outta brewskis again. it’s like, your turn, man.
drunk2: *groan* aw man, dude. alright, dude. i’ll be like, back in 20.

well, i thought it was funny.

i just finished watching Soul Plane. i want the last 86 minutes of my life back, please.

please?!

despite having to consistently wake up at an ungodly hour, i’ve managed to resist the temptation to drink coffee.

why is it a temptation, you ask? quite simply because i was addicted to it in the past. while working at my company’s suburban office, i used to consistently drink four to five cups a day (if not more) just to stay alert. coffee and i had a special relationship that only a deathly tired person could share with a highly caffeinated beverage.

then school started up again. and i died. there was no free coffee at The University (those cheap bastards) and it became obnoxiously apparent to me that my java dependency was definitely not a good thing. i couldn’t BUY coffee, that was completely out of the question. after all, i’m Chinese (read: cheap) and was, conveniently enough, also poor. needless to say, i had a very hard time doing pretty much anything.

so, back to the present: despite having to consistently wake up at an ungodly hour, i’ve managed to resist the temptation to drink coffee.

until today, that is.

the coffee here at headquarters ain’t free so resistance has been relatively easy for me. however, today was someone’s last day and to celebrate, they had bought her an enormous cake and a huge jug-like thing of coffee.

so i got a cup.

i know it’s been almost a year but if memory serves me correctly, COFFEE IS NOT SUPPOSED TO TASTE LIKE MOTOR OIL. it was disgusting but i chucked a few sugars in and drank it anyway. i needed the caffeine. i needed it now.

i got my wish after the second gulp. my face suddenly felt extremely tight and my eyes flung open like someone had just stabbed me in the crotch.

so yeah. i’m awake now.

there’s something marvelous about freedom. the sun shines a little brighter, the air seems a little less polluted…even the pigeons appear to be slightly less retarded. today was a good day.

work still blows chunks though.

dusk had just begun to set in as the 95th/DanRyan lazily rolled to a halt. “this is Cermak Chinatown,” the recording blared seconds before the doors opened. i stepped out as i had done countless times before and made my way down the grimy stairs as the Chinese opera masks hanging overhead glared at me disapprovingly.

it was freshman year and i had just recently purchased my first digital camera, the venerable Sony DSC-P50. i had bought it used on ebay and made it a point to spend a large chunk of my freetime out shooting with it to get my money’s worth. this day was no exception. sunset in Chinatown was tonight’s objective.

as i made a quick right at the base of the stairs and began toward an intersection, i noticed a mob 30-40 strong standing on the sidewalk. since they weren’t really moving, i immediately assumed that someone had been brutally beaten or had suffered an accident and the crowd was nothing more than curious passersby who were gawking and possibly poking the victim with pointy sticks.

then as i walked closer, i noticed three things: 1. the whole crowd was white, 2. some of them were carrying camcorders and 3. they were all looking across the street. my formerly expressionless face contorted in disgust as my college brain slowly put two and two together.

those sackie tourists were waiting for the walk signal!

“ugh,” i muttered to myself as i stood beside the crowd and began watching traffic. i quickly spotted an opening and began my journey to the other side of the street. about halfway through, however, an EXPLOSION of honking came from behind.

now i don’t know about you, but when i jaywalk, i look for gaps in traffic that are ONLY BIG ENOUGH FOR ME TO GET THROUGH…NO MORE, NO LESS. if you understand me, then you can imagine the LOOK ON MY FACE as i slowly turned around to see that THE WHOLE FREAKING CROWD OF IDIOT TOURISTS HAD APPARENTLY DECIDED TO FOLLOW ME ACROSS THE STREET.

i cursed in three languages. at once.

wasting no time, i hurried across the rest of the street and turned around wide-eyed to survey the chaos that i had inadvertently caused. not only did the morons STOP TRAFFIC in one of the BUSIEST intersections in CHINATOWN, but THEY JUST KEPT STANDING THERE. IN. THE. MIDDLE. OF. THE. FREAKING. ROAD.

i briefly fantasized about piling them all into a spaceship and sending it into the sun. this was BEYOND ridiculous.

then after about oh…FIVE HOURS standing in the middle of the road, the world’s smratest tour group decided to retreat back to their original position.

where they stood as the signal began flashing “don’t walk.”

…

today is not a good day. i need to refix a lot of bugs on my site now due to some incredibly bogus things that happened today.

ugh.

now the company for which i slave isn’t exactly what you would call the most organized corporation in the world. aside from their lacking paperclip supply, i’ve also noticed unacceptably sloppy work that has been handed down to me for revision. i swear, some of this stuff looks like it was banged out by a dyslexic chimpanzee with a heavy drinking problem.

anyway, one of the things i’ve been doing at my job is going through hundreds of policy/procedure documents and printing out the ones needed for my current project. all of these files are stored in an online database so i spend a great deal of time sitting here plugging policy numbers into the search engine and more often than not, i’ll get some totally bogus search results along with the document i’m looking for.

for this particular case, i had been searching for policy #17.110.13 when i was met with the usual slew of totally unrelated search results. unphased, i quickly scan the unnecessarily long list for #17.110.13 only to have this catch my eye.

sorry. i’m usually not a big fan of crude humor, butt (teehee) i couldn’t help butt (teehee) post this.

teehee. butt.