Q & A

Morning meditation:

Oof. Today was one loooong hour-long hour. I was really impatient for some reason, even more than usually. Maybe it's because today I meditated at ~11:30AM instead of the usual 9:00AM, and my brain had already had time to sink into the afternoon mindset, apparently one of ADD. Also, there were lots of distracting sounds today. Planes, trains, automobiles, humming refrigerators, ringing cellphones, garbage pickups, the walls crackling from minute changes in temperature, pretty much everything you could ask for except for the ice cream truck and carolers. And Santa Claus.

I did have a couple of interesting moments when I felt curiously misaligned with my body, as if I had drifted over a couple of inches, but was also simultaneously in the original spot. It was a tricky feeling to hold onto, because the moment I'd notice it, I'd snap right back into place. The day I can hold it I'll probably end up blaming it on excessive calorie intake.

I was thinking yesterday that God is a lot like the Placebo Effect. It doesn't really matter whether he's a sugar pill or an antibiotic or a big jolly bearded guy in a cloud, riding a dinosaur. If you manage to believe in him, even if you're tricked into doing so, you can extract benefit for yourself. Or harm of course. Let's forget about God for a second, and just think about the Placebo Effect. Basically it says that whatever you believe, happens. Like, if you take a sugar pill thinking it's a cancer cure, you have a 99.99% chance of being cured (Note: figures are not to scale). Or if you jump out of an airplane and believe you have a parachute, but you really don't, then you're totally screwed. Actually...ignore that last one. OK, if you believe in Santa, your parents will give you presents addressed from him. If you believe in a wrathful and vengeful God, I will come shoot you in the head. If my physician tells me my lymph nodes are OK, I will believe her, and they'll stop spraying fountains of blood. So you see that the Placebo Effect is very powerful. And now I forget where I was going with this.

A joke my friend Pei wrote about me:

It happened as mark was in primary school...
teacher : mark, how come u r late again!!
mark: I met a lost 3 year-old kid by the railway on the way here.
teacher: come on... pls use a better story next time.
mark: I did send him home.
teacher: where is his home?
mark: ya when I asked him that, he was pointing to the railway. So I put him on the rails.
teacher: .......

(my reaction)
Mark: that's good!
Pei: when I was thinking of u, I thought, mark, he is a baby-killer... here we go...

A joke I wrote about my friend Pei:

Pei: talk dirty to me, I love it when you talk dirty to me.
Mark: mm...your apartment's so dirty, so dirty, I'm going to go clean it right now!
Pei: yea baby! you know what turns me on!

Yea...that may take some background to understand.

And one more about Pei (we're collaborating on a joke book that only the two of us will understand):
Pei is walking down the street. She sees a 5 year old kid and his mother. The kid must have been misbehaving, because the mother is beating the crap out of him, spanking him like there's no tomorrow.
Pei: ah...I wish I had a kid.

(today, in the kitchen)
Mark is peeling a clementine. Michelle walks up and puts her hand out, demanding some. Mark shoves the whole clementine in his mouth.
Michelle: Mom! Mark stole my clementine!

I tried writing some more jokes today, but in a different style. I tried posing a question and then thinking of responses from different people, with the responses caricaturing the answeree. I can't really tell if it's funny, and you'd have to know the people reasonably well to understand what I'm getting at, but it made me crack up when I wrote them:

Question: You have 24 hours to live, what do you do?
Mom: 24 hours...that's 12 movies!
Dad: 24 hours...that's eight 3-hour meditations. No, wait! Twenty-four 1-hour meditations!
Mark: 24 hours...can I at least get an extra half-hour to blog about it after?
Grandma: 24 hours...do you know what happened in Israel in only the last 3 hrs? No? Well let me describe it to you in gory detail for the next 24.
Boris: 24 hou...(snore)
Pei: 24 hours...that's enough time to try 240 new sex positions!
Manlin: 24 hours...how fast do they deliver chocolate?
Zhang Xiao Yi: 24 hours...damn, my parents are going to kill me when I tell them!
Chun: 24 hours...OK, first 5 minutes - call my Mom and Dad to tell them the news. The next 23 hours and 50 minutes - plan out the remaining 5 minutes. Aha! Not a minute gone to waste!
Tina: 24 hours...wow, life sucks.
Mario: 24 hours...that's time enough to learn 3 new Chinese words, forget 5 Russian ones, and start learning three new languages!
Igor: 24 hours...Renata! What am I doing for the next 24 hours!?
Frank: 24 hours...no problem. I have a business plan just for the occasion! It's a franchise. We're going to have 12 stores open within the first 10 hrs and we should be up to McDonald's scale by hour 24.
Serge: 24 hours...that's enough time to build a successful family, right?
Perry: 24 hours...convert as many Christians as I can to antheism. Now that's time well spent.
Lucy: 24 hours...bull. I bet I can live longer than that.

Question: What will you do when your son's begging you for a new toy he doesn't deserve?
Mom: don't give it to him, but then cry myself to sleep at night.
Dad: don't give it to him. Instead, make fun of him till he develops a serious psychological disorder.
Michelle: I have a son? That means I had sex! EWWWW!!!
Grandma: buy him every toy in the store. Oh, wait! Did you say son or grandson?
Mark: my son? Did the condom break? This is a completely unrealistic situation! Fine, I'd probably go get a DNA test then, see if he's really my son. There's no toy in existence that a son of mine wouldn't deserve. Ah, he's already so much like his father.
Chun: tell him he can have the toy in installments. Get him planning his life early on!
Mario: how old is he? 5? Trade him in for five 1-year-olds. No! Half of a ten-year-old!
Pei: give it to him. I love him, so why wouldn't I buy it? Wait, that's not how you raise children?
Zhang Xiao Yi: Chinese children know better than to beg for toys. I knew I shouldn't have married an American. They're inferior!
Manlin: play mind games with him. "You really want that toy? You don't not really want it? You wouldn't want not to not want to want to not have it?" Hehe.
Tina: toys? Yay! Mine mine mine mine! Phew, OK, sad now.
Igor: oh Christ. Renata!
Frank: wait, how did he get out of his cage?
Serge: buy myself a new car. And a new house. And then work harder and earn more money so I can buy the toy. Man, where does the money go!?
Perry: you know those noise-canceling headphones? What did you say? I can't hear you.
Lucy: beat the little devil half to death. Studies show it's optimal for his development.

Question: Why did the chicken cross the road?
Mom: because we're vegetarian.
Dad: it's a reincarnation of a nomadic tribesman, come on dude, ask me something harder.
Mark: I told you ten times already! Don't tell me any news unless it's good news! I've heard this all a million times. People are dying, there's war and povery, blah blah blah.
Michelle: a chicken? Where?!? I'm scared. Wait, are chickens dogs or insects?
Grandma: a chicken? Do you know that ten people were blown up in Israel today?
Igor: Renata, didn't we discuss this the other day? What did we decide?
Chun: aha! All part of my plan for getting into medical school! Check!
Frank: I don't know, but someone grab that chicken! The chicken/turkey exchange rate is climbing faster than my blood pressure!
Paul: hahaha! Someone saw a chicken! That's so crazy, man, that's so crazy!
Mario: I don't know, but I trust it. I'm getting outta here.
Pei: chicken? Who cares about chickens? Ask me about fish.
Tina: crap, I had this at my Google interview...and I remember getting it right...what was it!?...ugh!
Manlin: mmffhhahmm...sorry, was eating chocolate. Umm... (pause) did you get that? My MSN died. No? I said "maybe there's better Internet connection over there?"
Serge: a chicken crossed my road!? Where is it? Give me that chicken, we have some words to say to each other if you know what I mean. Quickly, before I forgive it!
Perry: don't even get me started. And no, chickens were not created by Jesus, they were created by a little thing called evolution, heard of it?
Lucy: did you know that chicken blood is green? I swear. It's true. Fine, look it up nay-sayer. It's not true? No way!

Monkeys

Today's daddy's birthday. On people's birthdays you're supposed to tell them what you think about them without holding anything back, no matter how horrible it is, right? Or is that at people's funerals? One sec, researching... What? That's lame. Apparently you're never supposed to tell anyone the whole truth about themselves, unless it's 99% complimentary or you're at a writing workshop. Or if you don't plan on them being useful to you in the future. Nation of liars and wusses. But...I guess I can abide by the rules this one time. Don't want to completely conform to non-conformity. You get a freebie today, daddy-oh.

Tomorrow's Sunday, but I'm afraid they'll miss me at church. If there's one thing I don't want to overdose on, it's Jesus' blood and body. Cocaine's bad enough.

Some random scenes from today/yesterday that seemed funny to me (I play the role of Mark):

(watching the climax scene of Soldier)
Mark: are they holding hands?
Mario: yea, they're about to die.
Mark: so if we were about to die, you'd be trying to grab my hand?
Mario: of course
Mark: I'm glad we're not dying then

(Mark's holding the remote and trying to turn off the tv, button sticks)
Mark: I keep pressing this button but it won't work. I think it's a sign...
Mario: of what?
Mark: ...that I need to keep pressing it

(pre-sleep discussion/meditation in their respective beds)
Mark: that was a good idea that Bill Gates had, to name his operating system Windows. Cause now everything's a window, browser window, game window...
Mario: yea, I'm pretty sure it was in the reverse order though.
Mark: ah. Good point. That makes more sense.
Mario: but who knows? If he called it Wildcat, we might be saying "man, I got all these Wildcats cluttering my screen."
Mark: haha. "Can you imagine if he called it Windows instead? Bill would never have sold a single copy!"
Mario: "well yea, not with stupid name like that. And Wildcat would never have been the multi-thousand dollar corporation it is today."
Mark: "the economy wouldn't even be in the thousands yet. They'd probably still have centi-cents."

Lies

More dutiful letters from a dutiful brother:

Hi Michelle,

This is Mark (your brother). Nothing's happening here, so I'm forced to make up lies to entertain you. Anywhere from one to all of them might be true though, so make up your own mind about which you believe.

While you've been away, crazy things have been happening here. From here on, nothing but the truth:

First of all, Mom's having another baby! And due to the marvels of modern science, the doctors said they could speed up her gestation period (usually 9 months) to two and a half weeks, AND it'll be born 12 years old. Unfortunately, since we don't have the money to take care of it, we're gonna have to dump it at the local adoption clinic. 12-yr-olds are about $30 a piece these days, so that's a clean profit.

Dad changed his name again, you'll never guess to what. His new name is Michelle. He wants to prove he can be a better Michelle than you, so you better practice every day in camp. Meanwhile, he's definitely proven to be a louder and hairier Michelle, though we haven't voted on whether that's better or worse.

Grandma bought a leash for Boris with a little electric tazer attached. Now she can give him a mini-heartattack without straining her vocal chords. She's also been spinning webs of lies about me promising to come over three times a day, but I've been calling her bluffs, and not going.

I have this annoying pimple on my face, with a hair growing through it. I tried to rip it off, but it must be a mutant or something, it's way too strong for me. Finally managed to kill it with a combination of John's holy water and a blow-torch.

Finally, some sense fell down from the sky and I've decided Texas life isn't for me, and anyway, it's about time to get married and have some children. Chun's flying in this Wednesday, and we're going to the altar on Thursday. Everyone except Serge and Natasha are invited, we can show them photos afterwards. Mom and Dad have reluctantly postponed enlightenment for the next 20 years, so they can devote all their time to spoiling their grandchildren: little Ding Dong and Ming Cheung.

OK, I think you'd better go now, too much good news is bad for the kidneys.

-Mark "the whole truth and nothing but the truth" Vayngrib

P.S.: Don't worry about missing the wedding, we'll save you a slice of cake.

Off to Boston tomorrow for a little while, though you should pretend you don't know this, whoever you are, in case I don't want to see you. Today's ass-ignment - finish Eat, Pray, Love, start and finish A Wrinkle In Time. Jonathan Strange has been ruthlessly abandoned; after suffering through 100 pages awaiting the arrival of the main character and some sign of action replacing description as the main vehicle, I remembered that I am an excellent quitter and hung an early ending on the crap novel. I harbor little doubt that my 100-page version is at least eight times better than the original 800-page one.

I Rule

Visited my cousin and his new wife today. After putting on some clothes, they ate breakfast in front of our malnourished faces and tortured us for information. Specifically, my cousin took an unexpected interest in my choice of career-path - not having one. He threatened me with gefilte fish so I blabbed like a girl-scout. He expressed doubts about the potential success of not earning any money, and told me to contact him when I'm ready to reform and follow him into law.

Driving Michelle to the sleepaway camp drop off tomorrow at 7AM because I'm such a good brother, and because she's still better at yelling and whining than I am at tuning it out.

Played/sang some Beatles/Something Kinky songs with Mom/Michelle today, with microphone/guitar, and an odd number of good ears. Upon completion, we decided the quantity of fun garnered merits a reoccurence. Perhaps even one as temporally proximal as tomorrow.

Chun showered me with ego-candy today, so I'm high as a kite, and sprinting to brush teeth and sleep before Dad comes upstairs and shoves a Ford Explorer through my bubble. Come to think of it, I've got to try this out on my friends - flatter them silly and then hit them below the belt with a figurative folded chair from IKEA. That'll teach them...something.

Not much

Recording session scheduled for tomorrow. MIDI will play drums, Mark will provide the other instrumentation, and Mom will do the yapping with perhaps Michelle harmonizing; the men in this house have very limited ability to stay on pitch.

Reading Jonathan Strange and M. Norrel. Easy read so far, but haven't decided if the potential entertainment value is worth the risk of reading 800+ pages only to have read The Magus over again.

Going to visit more relatives tomorrow, then taking care of Dad for the rest of the day - he plans on getting pretty sick.

Improbable

Today defied all odds. First of all, I didn't get a root canal. Instead, I fell for the oldest trick in the dentist manual - first make them pay for a new filling in the doomed tooth, and then make them pay again a week later for a root canal. The first step of this new plan took place today, the second won't be long in waiting. The filling, which was supposed to allay sensitivity to cold - instead decided to not do that. Russian dentist #2 better watch his fingers next time he sticks them in my mouth.

The second odds-defying event was the lack of cinematic entertainment at the day's end. The problem is that Mom and Dad don't watch movies after the yoga lesson, but they do turn the selfishness dial to 11. I had several films lined up to be sacrificed, and even naively made some popcorn. Then, just as I approached the territory of the Play button with a practiced digit, Mom decided today was the day she was to begin her formal guitar training, and the setting was to be right between my headphones and my ears. And so she wouldn't be distracted by the popcorn while she played, she and Dad chomped it all before I could say "You Porkers!"

Went to Barnes and Noble's today, picked up a copy of The Magus and attempted to find where I left off at home in my library copy. Ten minutes of confusion later, I realized that I held a book version of a "director's cut" edition - complete with new scenes and revised old ones. Frustration and cursing ensued: unlike a DVD, this book didn't conveniently store the additions and revisions behind a separate menu item. Instead everything was interwoven with the original. I eventually found my place, but the book continued in an almost style alien to the one I had been reading. This would be even more annoying if it merited reading both versions.

Oh, forgot, some more whining: The Magus is slowly and disappointingly becoming less and less mysterious, magical, mythlike, and more Da-Vinci-Code-esque - a new twist, a new puzzle on each new page. I was wondering when the drama was winding down what could possibly take the next 200 pages, but it's obvious now - baloney and cheese.

Family

Being an excellent brother, I put up with all kinds of demands from my not so baby sister. The latest is to write letters to her while she's at sleepaway camp. This borders on the ridiculous, because she is back every Saturday morning for the weekend. This means that in order for me to successfully get a letter to her by Friday, I have to sprint to the post office as soon as she gets on the bus on Monday, and scribble something mildly entertaining down before their truck leaves. Here's the last one I sent her:

Hi Michelle,

Hope this week is even more fun than last week! While you're away I make sure to practice Stairway to Heaven, do algebra word problems, and watch two movies a day so that you don't fall behind. It's a rough life being both you and me at the same time. I've even picked out some sneakers and a dress for myself, but Mom and Dad are making me choose one of the two.

Did you play guitar at the talent show? Or did you decide to do something else instead? What did other people do? I guess you'll have to tell me at home because by the time this letter gets there you'll have already complained to me in person about not writing.

Dad and I are doing pushups twice a day now, so prepare to see two muscle-bound warriors when you return. I don't want to brag, but our beauty is on a truly meteoric rise.

OK, I don't want to keep you in your tent too long and get your counselors fired, so go pretend you like them.

-Mark "I can barely type cause my muscles are so huge" Vayngrib

P.S.: Here's a cute joke I found:
Teacher: You copied Fred's test didn't you?
Student: How did you know?
Teacher: Fred's paper says "I don't know" and yours says "Me, neither!"

Unfortunately this won't earn me any credit with Michelle. One letter is worse than none, being half as good as the two-per-week she ordered.

Managed to convince my parents to come visit relatives with me yesterday. Going alone means becoming the center of attention, and my inflated sense of modesty abhors such situations. Ergo, I have to take a wingman - in this case two.

Visiting anyone is always most difficult for Dad, especially if it's relatives. The tragedy isn't in the action, but the aftermath. He goes, he plays the social butterfly, he almost makes them believe he still gives a damn, and no one but his roommates - me, Mom and Michelle - see the vomit-laden journey home.

Hmm...I suddenly grow suspicious of his habit of going to sleep last. After all, he does put up with Mom and me, and sometimes Michelle for long stretches of time. He probably has to pump his stomach nightly and self-prescribe obscene quantities of anti-depressants. I half-want to sneak downstairs tonight and throw down the curtain, but it's almost like spying on Santa during Christmas; I'd much rather believe in the gruesome fairy tale than the indubitably more mundane truth.

Home Schooling

I started this book today that's supposed to teach me jazz guitar technique in 20 weeks - rougly 4-5 months. The stated practice regimen was a meager 50 minutes/day so I thought "why not?" Nuh uh. The right answer was "yeah, right! (accompanied by a sarcastic cocking of the left eyebrow)."

Unfortunately this 50 minutes/day claim was another case of false advertising. If you can complete the daily assignments in this book in 50 minutes, you are way beyond needing the book in the first place. No matter. I'm not letting some stupid book, that's not even a real book (it's a pdf), beat me in one sitting. I will give up tomorrow at the earliest.

Came across a couple of funny quotes while surfing GNX3 forums:

"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." – Brian W. Kernighan

and

"Failure is not an option -- it comes bundled with Windows." - Unknown Smartass

Today, I made the true claim that there are more good actors and actresses. Unfortunately, I not only made it, but voiced it. I was in the car by myself, miles from home, thinking I was safe. No sooner than I uttered the fateful words "women suck," Mom materialized and began exercising her Constitutional right to feminism. I was treated to an interminable lecture on Women in Film starting with 1903's The Great Train Robbery.

Dad is calling me to do pushups. I've been obliging him lately. I hope this is what they mean when they say you should give back to your parents for all those years and dollars they spent raising you and teaching you to be grateful.

Bad Movie

Saw Wall-E today. Blah.

The first 6 hours of the should-be trilogy were almost bearable. There were cuteness, silly music, and cockroaches - apparently a recipe for success judging by IMDb's thousands of satisfied fans. It used to be that when prompted for my opinion on a movie, I could safely defer to IMDb; this saved the trouble of later defending said opinion. But now IMDb must be in league with the movie companies because the average rating for a crappy movie is around 8. Wall-E is rated an astounding 9.3. I would have been happy to agree if I hadn't watched it. Unfortunately I did, and even the IMDb-sponsored professional applauders in the theater couldn't convince me of a single point deserved above a "5 for special effects."

"It's OK, it's over, you made it," I thought, as I made my way back to the car with my parents and my little sister. Wrong! My dad, though he claimed the movie had bored him into a stupor, would not stop reenacting the aforementioned boredom, with such skill that I fell asleep at least 8 times behind the wheel on the 2-mile ride home. Bored my ass! Now the traitor's probably voting on IMDb to infalte Wall-E's rating to an even greater obscenity.

Just heard from Chun, she loved it of course. This is good intel - she is not to be trusted.

Showed grandma our music today. Can't say she loved it. I showed her ~5 songs, and when I mentioned Mario was still finishing one of them, she asked "why finish? They all sound the same." Ouch. No worries though, grandma's been discredited. I grabbed a piece of apple pie as I left her house, and it smelled like cheese. When she shoved a tomato under my nose to smell the divinity, it smelled like the fish she'd been slicing. Hey, if she can't tell the difference between those...

Blah and Blah

Ohhhhh Shaymalayma. I was wrong about you. You managed to make me laugh with your stupid stupid movie.

Mario left today, I think. I guess we'll find out soon.

Chun uploaded a bunch of pictures today, from senior ball, our trip to Maine, so I freed up some time in my busy schedule for some narcissism. Our house is already a narcissist's dreamhouse - wall-length mirrors in every bedroom - but when you're as special as me, you can't help wanting to be surrounded by yourself from all sides.

The trip to Maine, in case someone doesn't know, was an extreme adventure into mother nature. For four days, twelve of us (6 guys, 6 girls) camped out, without even so much as a firepit(!), in a beautiful home in Acadia National Park.
There was only one Wii, two TVs, central heating, and a half dozen bedrooms worth of accomodations, but luck favors the brave. We managed to survive the harsh conditions by always looking for that silver lining - the Stop & Shop at the end of the driveway, our two cars, and 12 credit cards. Everyone made it out more or less alive, and no one got pregnant from the late night orgies. Still, I wouldn't recommend it.

Almost got roped into a Dickens movie today, an idea that could only have spawned from the Masterpiece-Theater-zealot mind of my materfamilias. At the last moment I was stricken with a sudden case of jaw-breaking yawns and I was mercifully allowed to go to bed. Dickens stayed downstairs and entertained my mother for the next two hours. Dad didn't even put up a fight, he just went straight to bed and cried himself to sleep.

Think I'll go to Barnes and Noble tomorrow. It's time to get disillusioned with Queen.