Eating Disorder

Wow, I haven't been here in about three months. This is not a good thing as this is THE place where I keep up my writing skills, meager as they are...

Anyway, I've come to realize that I must have an eating disorder with regard to timing. Last night at dinner, I was eating some stir-fried that Musubichan cooked up. It was good and I was hungry, so I was eating rather vigorously. I am pretty dexterous with chopsticks and can convey food to my mouth rather quickly, but it seems I have a timing issue these days. At one point, I failed to pull out the chopsticks from my mouth quick enough and ended up biting into its tip, cracking not only my favorite pair of chopsticks, but also a small portion of my front tooth (right incisor).

How stupid of me. I should relax while I eat and concentrate on taking the chopsticks out of my mouth before I start chewing. But concentrating on the mechanics of eating would distract me from the pleasure of eating, and that would make meals uninteresting. Of course, the upside would be that I might eat less and lose weight, and save myself the agony of going to the dentist to repair my teeth, let alone losing my favorite set of chopsticks.

Hope everyone in Xangaland is well and healthy this summer.

Random Thoughts

I am still adjusting to tweeting on Twitter. Most seem to write about their everyday life--I going to lunch, I worked out today, I'm meeting a friend for drinks tonight. I started to do something similar, but I am unsure if other people want to know or even care about the minutiae of my everyday life. So instead I've been tweeting things that don't necessarily deal with specific activities of my everyday life, but express more about what I'm thinking or feeling.

In the past few days, this is what I've written (some editing was involved):

• Anyone know what is "pi day"? Is it about "pies" or the ratio between a circle's circumference and its diameter?
• Onigiriman is really digging the original UK version of Life on Mars, although the slang is sometimes a pain in the jacksie.
• Onigiriman needs a bolt of energy to get his butt moving forward, but a ponderous, cloudy DC Sunday is not helping.
• Onigiriman wants to know: What is OpenDNS? Can someone explain this to me?

Can anyone answe some of these questions? I'm not getting much of a response from these tweets, but then what can you say in 140 characters or less?

Happy Spring

My thoughts for today:

• Dear Mr. President. Hah! So there! UCLA 65, VCU 64... okay, so it was close...
• I am even more livid with AIG and the economic crisis after reading an article on Rolling Stone Magazine that outlines how it started, how we got here, what the mind set of Wall Street is, and ultimately how screwed we all are. Must read The Big Takeover.
  
• Today is the Vernal Equinox--actually it was 7:44 this morning. Happy First Day of Spring everyone! Well, as happy as one can be given our current situation.
  

I'm such a Twit

I had heard of Twitter quite a while ago when the people at RBJ began tweeting--I think that's the verb--with each other. I resisted. I swore that I have enough sites to my name at places like Blogger, Hotmail, Aim, RBJ, LiveJournal, Wordpress, Nutang, CafePress (yes! buy Onigiriman goods!), Flickr, Shutterfly, YouTube, MySpace, Flickster, Technorati, just to name a few. (Just so you know, I don't even deal with many of these sites anymore, I just want to hold onto my name. ) I figure that it was enough. I even have a Jaiku account which is I think similar to Twitter, so I thought, "Why bother?"

Well, it seems that everyone on TV is talking about Twitter. It's like the Facebook for 2009. So what did I do today? I registered.

Unfortunately.... Someone already is using my screen name. I mean seriously, my name is so unique, why would anyone want to steal it? Worse, I don't think this person is using it because s/he has no updates, no followings, no followers. What's up with that?

Oh well, I don't own a cell phone so I don't know when I'll be tweeting, but I will try to do what everyone else seems to be doing--Exposing every facet of his/her life. Sheesh. What is this world coming to?

Obama's (non) State of the Union Address

It is customary for a president to be seated for a year before he gives a State of the Union Address, so Obama's speech last night was not really a State of the Union. Even though the talking heads on TV treated it as such--my poison is MSNBC--it wasn't. It was more like the Hopeful State of the Union, the way Obama envisions how his stimulus package will work out when implemented. There were a few promising moments, but he grabbed my attention when he got to education. This is the first time I can remember any president speak so publicly about the necessity of HIGHER education--education beyond high school--and how it will hold a place of prominence in his policy.

It is our responsibility as lawmakers and educators to make this system work. But it is the responsibility of every citizen to participate in it. And so tonight, I ask every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training. This can be community college or a four-year school; vocational training or an apprenticeship.

But whatever the training may be, every American will need to get more than a high school diploma. And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It's not just quitting on yourself, it's quitting on your country — and this country needs and values the talents of every American. That is why we will provide the support necessary for you to complete college and meet a new goal: By 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.

I'm a college professor, and I'm not embarrassed to admit that I got misty eyed when I heard this.