Usually when I go to a substandard Chinese restaurant, the wooden chopsticks wrapper looks like this: [click image to open larger in new window]



For years I've been entertained by the friendly message on this paper wrapping. It's all kooky with the grammar and capitalizations and all that... I always dig misspellings on stuff. Somewhere in Manhattan there's a sign for a psychic that is spelled P-S-C-H-I-C. It's huge! It's the main sign. Misspelled stuff like that is everywhere. I wonder about if the printer just doesn't catch the error? Or do they just print whatever the customer writes exactly... as policy? Or maybe they don't care? Like what the hell happened? I'm not so nutty with grammar, but when it's glaring, I'd love to find out how it went wrong.

So with these chopsticks... obviously there's a problem here. The thing that makes me wonder extra is once in a while this message changes slightly. Someone somewhere makes a "correction" and "cultual" will be spelled differently wrong or the message will be slightly tweaked. This time 'round, I noticed that "glorious" (which was spelled correctly last time) has been changed to "glonous". I think about how some dude over in China at a printmaker thing in-correcting the spelling of words and then going back to press. How? Why?! These chopsticks change every year or so with new grammar or spelling issues. It has never been right.

Somewhere along the line you would think someone put a stop to this. Like someone would let the guy at the chopstick factory know about this and send them the proper English. Actually on second thought... I hope that never happens. This typical cultual miscommunication is traditional for me now... and I think fun like this is perfectly glonous.

(After several moments of browsing, I reached Chinese Cultual History and Glonous: The Lineage and Development of the Modern Chopsticks Wrapper, a thorough explanation of the derivation of the wordings on these wrappers. If you're interested, it's worth a chuckle.)

I wanted to write an October post, and fortunately procrastinated just enough to write a sentence on its last day. Real post coming soon [make that two sentences].

As a complete waste of my time, I have been editing all of my previous posts (from when I was totally weird), for a number of reasons: Much of the offending things I've said I realized they were very hurtful, so I removed them. I fixed spelling errors and strange grammar inconsistencies, just so if anybody reads them I don't sound retarded. I changed formatting differences, from when I used to align my paragraphs on the right to make it look "cool", so that it looks attractive with the new site layout. Even though I prospect nobody will ever look at them, if somebody does, I don't want to seem like a dumbass.

I've thought about a lot of things during the past day and a half. If my mind gets less cluttered, I'll post them here.

Life is so evil to me. I work as hard as 50% of me wants to (which should be enough to get more A's than B's) but, no. A in health and French, and the rest B's. Kind of like 83 and 84 in English and history, 89.1 in science, 88.4 in computer science. That's probably because I got a 30 on jeopardy because Mrs. Wu doesn't know document.getElementById(). And like 87-ishs in the other ones I didn't mention. Correction: 4 A's (band too because we got I's at festival, maybe computers because Mrs. Wu didn't realize how to change groups on my program because I didn't use radio buttons – instead you click on the box containing the team's score), 4 B's (science 89.1, history 84, English 83.8, math 87.5).

I broke my two smaller toes on my left foot. If you really want to know how, I kicked my sister. And that made it a little hurt, but it got all black and blue when a fscked up Eastern sixie opened the door on my foot. So I got x-rayed, and my bone marrow cracked. But the doctor can't really do anything about it so they told me to splint it with adhesive for a month and wear a cast-shoe for two weeks. You know how for Velcro there are two sides, one rough that sticks to the smoother side? Well it's really stupid because both sides of the Velcro on the cast are rough. So now it'll just look retarded.

Went to festival, kind of boring bus ride (sat next to Brady). We kind of sang (doot-dit-doot'ed) our songs on the bus there, did the usual stuff at the place, heard two bad bands (one group stalled for about twenty minutes practicing scales and [horribly] tuning the timpanis on stage) and the other wasn't quite that bad. I took out my digi-tuner and tuned the very sharp and occasionally very flat band. Then we went to Wheaton Plaza food court, I ordered beef teri from Sarku. Conversation with waitress: "Hi, I'd like number 6." "Euh... I'm sorry, no more number 2." "I said number 6." "Um, we not have number 3 either." [Holding up fingers] "Six." "Oh oh oh. Wait please." ... "No more six. We only have 2 or 3." "I'll have 3. No mushrooms." "Sorry, we don't have steamed rice." And so on. Sat with Nilay. Ride back, looked at people in their cars and tried to figure out what their job was. Kris, Jane, and Sylvia played some sort of pagan Korean wrist-hurting-slapping game. Other than that the trip was boring.

My piano teacher says I've developed the best memory of all her students. That's probably because Rhapsody in Blue is so difficult but it really built up my memorization. Also, I've played Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Modern, but I can't figure out which one I like more. Two years ago I was obsessed with Bach and stuff. A couple months ago I was into Gershwin. Now I like Chopin. I think I like Chopin more though. Whatever.

I'm going to Walter Johnson. Probably. I'm waiting for Blair, but my parents have the least confidence that I'll get in off the wait pool. And we never even knew about APEX. So. I'm probably going to take all AP classes. Maybe even harmony & composition. And I'm probably taking health in the summer at Blair. Maybe.

My family is going to Newark from Friday (30 March) to Monday (2 April). It's going to be a waste of time. Picture: really stupid and annoying sister in car for twelve hours plus. I'm probably getting picked up at school near or at the end of last block, so I won't be riding the bus. Argh. Stupid dad. Since the hotel is really crappy I probably won't be able to get online at all. We're coming back on the first night of Passover, which will be a complete overhaul and minimally exciting. As it usually is. And again, I got in trouble with my parents so I'll be spending much less time on the computer.

And someone just reminded me of a "ghetto-faboo" Mr. White quote: "Jus' chillin' wit' my lil' Asian psychos."