In the Car.

A typical car ride with my whole familia entails us the three fully grown children smushed in the back seat usually laughing and having a jolly ol time but also occasionally breaking into fights most often started by me, the “mature” oldest. I suppose being 25 and all I could very well sit all mature-like in my seat and look out yonder through the window at the passing trees and occasionally comment on the frailty of life or something, but I would much rather amuse myself by getting the two youngest in trouble a la grade-school antics by tattling on em at all available opportunities.

Baby Susan.

Happy Monday everyone! I hope everyone has returned safe and sound from out yonder and are now nicely tucked back into where y’all belong, which in my case is this FREEZING ICE-CHAMBER OF DEATH disguised as an office (shivering under jacket and lap blanket).

While at home, my baby brother made this amazing discovery of a giant blue folder containing everything I considered of utmost value throughout elementary school! It included all my honor roll certificates, soccer team pictures, musical and concert playbills, every card and post-it my third grade teacher ever wrote me, all the epic stories I wrote in third grade on now-frayed and browned paper, and last but not least, a little blue book called “Third grade memories” that our class made at the end of the year.

I present to you from that book, an original Susan Draws by baby Susan circa 1993:



Obviously I was a great deal more confident of a third grader than I remembered myself to be (check out that coy winking action!) and did not yet possess the great pentagon-drawing skeelz (for the pentagon glasses) I possess today after many many years of grueling training (read: doodling throughout my entire educational career). Allow me also to point out how baby Susan painstakingly drew the line-work in the same color as the coloring to be done inside, with skin being drawn in peach marker, then colored in peach crayon. Brilliant!

Perhaps you may be interested to compare it with one I drew recently of baby Susan back in September:

http://susandraws.blogspot.com/2010/09/young-me-1.html

Thanksgiving.

Happy happy Thanksgiving from NorCal everyone!!!
Hope y’all eat tons of turkey and mashed potatoes and pie and all that good stuff in the company of all your close friends, family, and pets! See you next week!

Smoke.

Our beloved chain smoking CEO is in town this week, and sure sign of his presence is the thick near-visible plumes of cigarette smoke that fill the entire expanse of our office building. Often our eyes will irritate and tear, our throats scar from coughing, and our heads spin from inexplicable headaches and migraines, but all this we are used to, and none of this can deter us from our dogged love for our CEO, or rather: from doggedly acting like the Air Pollution Index in our building is not going head to head with mainland China and that our life expectancies are not fast deteriorating at the rate of minus one year every 15 minutes.

Quote of the Year.

Usually tidbits of chatter from the boys floating into my space automatically get filtered out as static and float right over my head, but this delicious morsel and shining gem of a quote floated in and stayed. What makes this quote most epic is not that the boy called a laptop a “beautiful machine” (fairly standard word usage within the PC industry), but that he started the sentence with “SHALL I…” instead of “can I” or “may I”, as if the pre-appointed time foretold since the beginning of the age had drawn nigh. This is what happens when you mix a majority of Koreans with a minority of non-koreans; though for the most part the Koreans will ignore the non-koreans, the very very rare times they do graciously decide to extend human interaction to the non-koreans, out of their mouths will come English so strange and so awkward that it completely surpasses the category of broken English and jumps right up into the ranks of awesome-double-rainbows-exploding-quote-of-the-year-English!

Pinky-a-gogo

After two weeks of mi coche Pinky-a-gogo (who is not actually pink) being extremely oppressed under mountain dirt from a weekend camping trip, I had never managed to find the time to go get him washed, and then: BAM POW! Over the weekend came these clouds bearing gifts of rain (read: FREE CARWASH!!!)! I am happy to report that Pinky-a-gogo is now the shiniest, happiest, squeaky-clean-est car in all the town! Kids, let this be a lesson that sometimes procrastination DOES pay off.

Champion!

I am totally proud to announce that yours truly has successfully beaten the entire current four levels of Angry Birds (BAM POW!)!!! I now pronounce myself champion and ultimate defeater and ruthless crusher of rubble and green pigs. Above you may see an actual snapshot of me taken for the local paper in which I am candidly chillaxing with my pals. In midair. Because we be FLY like that.

Octopus Hat.

If ever I ever had an octopus pet,
How surely most definitely assuredly I’d set

The pet right up on the top of my head
Passersby be awed, “How wonderful!” said

The octopus and me, what a sight to be seen!
We’d be the talk of the town, with fashion so keen!

Office Supply Sales Lady.

Figure A: Pretty Office Supply Sales Lady.


Figure B: Susan fixated on pretty office supply sales lady.


Figure C: More specifically fixated on her hair.


Figure D: Sad and jealous Susan.

Dapper Art Block.

Art Block.

Movie.

If my life was a movie and the movie was about a scale and about how I never use it and in the course of that movie I finally do decide to use it after not weighing myself for over half a year and the entire latter half of the movie was spent oscillating between thunderous and suspense ridden music because I am too scared to look at the numbers for fear that the numbers may very possibly have sky rocketed in the time I have neglected to check the scale and left it collecting dust in the corner of the bathroom... If my life was that movie and I was the main character on the scale too scared to look and the movie consisted of two hours with claustrophobic and nauseating footage of just that… Then this is the poster of that movie, and I am the one in that poster too scared to look.

Spolier alert: In the end I look and it turns out the number is the same as the one from half-a-year ago. Huzzah! lower number= win, but same number= win too. Now to abandon the scale again for another six months.

PSA.

We interrupt our regular programming today to bring you a happy mappy preppy yeppy positive Public Service Announcement! Don’t give up! You ken do eet! Woohoo~

Champion.

Since moving into our new haus, I have successfully fixed the broken food disposal in the kitchen sink, fixed the garage opener, removed the front screen door, fixed the stove, and risked my life to exchange an impossibly high stairway light bulb. I now consider myself the king and champion (nay, the MCGUYVER) of all new-haus-fixes and you may all refer to me as such hohoho (struts off to imaginary fanfare and applause).

DSLR.

I’ve gotten so used to framing photos through the viewfinder on my DSLR with eyeball right up against the camera that when someone hands me a point and shoot to take a picture for them I instinctively put the LCD screen against my eye and then become very, very confused.


Meanwhile the people who asked for the picture are confused that I am so confused with apparently no knowledge on how to point and shoot with a point-and-shoot.

3:00 AM.

Was sitting and doggedly resisting sleep past 1:30am when J showed up at home with none other than our friend A! Excited at the excuse to play more and sleep not when I definitely should have been (So sleepy...), we proceeded to fall into the deep dark wonderful and dangerously addictive pit that is YouTube, laughing our heads off over bygone meme after bygone meme.

Now allow me to point out to you in the skritchy drawing above, a very noticeable contrast. Zooming in:


Figure A: A normal person laughing

No matter how rip roaring heelarious a video, A never loses her composure. She is lovely when she laughs, and does so very cutely, with often a pretty dainty hand over her mouth.


Figure B: Susan laughing

I always tell myself to laugh like a lady but this is after I have already spent 30 minutes roaring in side-splitting, diaphragm-collapsing laughter. Also, for reasons unknown, I have found myself susceptible (read: guaranteed) to flailing my limbs around to express hilarity while also slapping something with one of my hands causing both deafness and a physical pummeling to anyone or anything situated in my immediate vicinity LOL

Hope y’all spend your weekend with happy funny people doing happy funny things that make you laugh till your abs tire :)

THE BOYS (aka 30+ year old Korean male)’s guide to being cool:

Being cool as a middle-aged man at my workplace is a lot like being cool in high school. It basically all comes down to the right manner of talk, the right friends, the right clothes, and the right subject matter to hiss about. Do you find yourself a middle-aged man but sadly ostracized at the office? Do you yearn for the type of shallow and fleeting affirmation only coolness can offer? Then this here is the guide for you!

1.Speak the right speak: Be Korean

This will allow you to speak exclusively in Korean with your other cool buddies no matter who may be sitting next to you or in front of you at lunch, effectively ostracizing anyone that does not speak or understand Korean. The more obnoxiously and loudly you speak in a room more heavily filled with a majority of non-Koreans the better. Tough luck if you are Chinese or White or anything else under the sun; you will not understand a single thing and no effort will be made to talk to you AT ALL. Instead you will sit awkwardly through company lunches staring at your food and wondering why everyone is laughing and if they are laughing at you. You may never know.

2. Be friends with the right people: The Boss

If the boss hates you, you are immediately and forever exempt from being cool. Make sure to be on his good side at all times, as it is he that has the final say in your job security and bonuses, but more importantly, your coolness. If deemed cool by the boss, he will help you and say cool things about you in front of everyone else. If not, he will say bad things and will not stop at demeaning, insulting, and humiliating you in front of every single person including strangers at restaurants.

3.Wear the right things: Transition Glasses

It is most imperative that you be fashion saavy and trendy in order to be cool. The hottest thing you can place on your face that will in turn make you irresistible to the 20-somethings you desire is not those nonsense aviator glasses but transition glasses. What can be hotter than something so practical? Glasses and sunglasses in one! The Wonder Girls will go wild for you. The true test of coolness is when you are loitering outside as cool boys are wont to do (extra cool points if you are simultaneously loitering AND chain smoking). Those whose glasses immediately turn pitch black are in. Those whose glasses remain clear… are out. Pair these babies with a shapeless pastel-colored company logo shirt with high-waisted pleated khakis and you are good to go. Cool as a bean.

4.Say the right things: Hate your wife

It is not cool – I repeat NOT COOL – to be a middle aged man that loves your wife or even think she is remotely nice or pretty. You must hate her or at least pretend to hate her for the sake of coolness and complain, gripe, and whine about her at all hours of the work day. One’s degree of coolness is governed by the amount of griping done. Especially gripe about how she nags at you and how you hate her singing and her driving and her friends and her hair and her breathing and everything else about her. Also remember to loudly blame her for everything that is wrong with you. She is the reason why you are late to work and fat and not a billionaire and not married to your high school sweetheart. If you do not have a wife to gripe about or blame everything on, you cannot be cool. You must make haste to find a random girl online who lives in Korea and who thinks any man in America is the ticket to untold riches, marry her within three months, bring her to the states, then proceed to gripe about her the very next day (true story).

Skritchy Throat.

For the past week I’ve had what feels like a single hair of teeny tiny baby bunny fuzz stuck in my throat that no amount of dry coughing or tea-chugging can get rid of. I am convinced the evil fuzz is conspiring to slowly gather minions in order to grow itself into an actual baby bunny lump in my throat. Usually I can prevent cold at the sign of early symptoms by sleeping it out, but it seems with this one that sleeping on it only serves to incubate it.

Squirrel.

Boiled chestnuts ftw!!! I’ve taken to savagely gnawing at em during all hours of work resulting in shell pieces flying everywhere and me in between bites attempting to maneuver a very sharp knife to simultaneously peel the shell while not skinning my fingers.

Aunt Flo.