夏の終わり

it's been a while since my last update... really, aside from school, i don't think i've been doing all that much.

sitting at home now, i realize how much better i like living on my own... i don't know if it's the fact that it's so hot and i can't just turn on the a/c 24/7 like i do at school, or if it's the fact that i feel guilty if i go out past say 10pm, or if it's because my dad keeps on telling me to fix his computers or clean my room... but i just feel so much more relaxed at my apartment in LA ^^;; maybe it's my friends in LA that make the difference... but they're disappearing one by one too :( kimoon has gone off to boston, which is good for him, since he was able to get into a master's program, and good for me because i think i'll be able to eat out less (and lose some weight) now that he's gone haha. but i guess that means no more random midnight outings to yogurtland or k-town... also, miki has left us for taiwan, so one of my mahjong-based sources of income has disappeared =[ but i guess that means i won't be forced to watch any more scary movies anytime soon bwahaha

speaking of movies, i've been watching a bunch of them lately... since last time i updated, i've seen inglourious basterds, district 9, couple's retreat, funny people, bruno, 500 days of summer, orphan, up, transformers 2, pelham 123. out of these, the one i regret watching the most would have to be bruno. it was nowhere near as funny as borat, nor was it really all that tasteful. following that would be orphan, since that just scared the sh*t out of me... i am never gonna adopt kids. ever..

i think my favorite of these would be district 9~ i went into it totally expecting it to be like a straight-up action flick, but it ended up being this pseudo-documentary, and it was pretty intense; it definitely made me think about the ugly side of human nature... while i guess i can understand being mean to the stupid aliens that cause trouble, wikus, the main guy in the movie, was quite a meanie to the alien who was trying to help him. i hope i am not that mean to anyone who's that nice to me... ^^;; i stayed pretty focused throughout the whole movie, which doesn't usually happen because i think i have adhd or something like that.

i also watched a bunch of movies at home: coraline, lemony snicket's a tale of unfortunate events, howl's moving castle, and ghost town. i liked all of these... maybe because the first three are for kids, and the last one is about a cranky dentist (kinda like my dad..... haha). i think i've probably seen more movies in the last few months than i have in the last couple years combined haha

school this quarter went pretty well, i think. i am still awaiting grades, but for the ones that have been released, i have passed them all =] we did some pretty cool stuff this quarter... one of the things i found kinda fun was pindexing. basically, we cut preparations for different types of indirect restorations (crowns, onlays, inlays, and the like) and then made a cast of it. then we mount it up and then cut it up into little removable sections. the whole process takes hours, and it's pretty meticulous, but it sure beats studying lol.. i still have to clean up the cast and apply the die spacer, but the tedious parts are done =]

i'm pretty sure that it's an asian thing not to use dishwashers as anything but a dish rack, so i think it's pretty understandable that i am not exactly very good at using one. seeing that the floor of my dishwasher was getting dusty from just being there without being used for about a year, i figured i'd run it with a little dishwashing machine detergent (i'd learned my lesson from last time, when i used the ultra concentrated dishwashing detergent instead of the special type for the machine...). after months of dust building up, the little cover to the cup that holds the detergent for the second round wouldn't close... and i didn't find out until after i had already put in all the detergent for both rinses, so i thought, what the heck, it's dishwashing machine soap, it should be ok...

*sigh* dishwashers hate me.

i went to try out this one place with mike in little tokyo called wakasaya. they serve donburi (stuff, mostly sushi, in rice bowls). their menu is quite attractive, everything looks so fresh and huge in their pictures, and the prices were acceptable. i guess it wasn't as good as it looked in the pictures; it was definitely not that big, and there was quite a bit of rice for the amount of fish they gave. in my opinion, akasaka is much more worth it, even though there's no way you could finish one of those bowls in one sitting haha..

anyway, what made wakasaya memorable is that in the middle of our meal a fight broke out between this one fat guy and one of the waiters. i didn't see it personally, but apparently the fat guy just started beating up the waiter out of the blue. i wasn't really sure what an appropriate course of action would be, so i just continued eating my bowl haha... (it was the same way at in-n-out when a fight broke out in front of me... some guy even got hit across the back with a chair o_O;; i just stood there waiting for my number to be called haha) i dunno, what would you do? haha..

the table of girls next to us just got up and left, and a bunch of other people just paid and left too. honestly, the thought had crossed my mind to just leave without paying, because i really don't think they'd do anything about it haha, but mike wanted to watch the fight so we stayed. in the end, the waiter was bleeding from the nose and the fat guy had his blood all over his arm. they took their fight outside, and after that i have no idea what happened...

me and mike, being the fatties that we are, decided a bowl of sushi was not enough, so we went to orochon to top it off. service was horrible... some chubby dirty looking white dude took our order, and when he gave us our food he totally messed up which one was spicy and which one wasn't, and his thumb was definitely swimming in the soup as he gave us our ramen... just another reason why shinsengumi is the best ramen place period. =] (and yes, it is better than daikokuya :P)

i only played mahjong once recently... my last time playing with miki for a while... it was pretty intense~ i had lost everything ($30) at one point, but i managed to make back enough to only lose $1.50 in the end XD
we just need to find a replacement for miki now...

and i think that just about sums up the highlights of my life over the last few months

cool stuff on the web:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJrGYpYx8CQ a string quartet plays video game music; it's pretty well done, and the people acting out the games on the side are pretty entertaining to watch too.

http://lab.andre-michelle.com/tonematrix make your own tune~ basically, click on the boxes to make it play a certain tone at a certain time. the tones are all chosen so that they won't really clash, and you can make a pretty cool repeating melody this way

http://armorgames.com/play/3527/gemcraft-chapter-0 Gemcraft!! i played the first one years ago...this new one is insanely long and very well done. it's basically a tower defense game, where you upgrade gems and place them in towers to attack the monsters. different gems have different attributes. i've been working on it for at least a month, still only like halfway done haha. and no, i don't know why i'm so obsessed with gem-based games (the other one being bejeweled...)