Being a goofy Asian dude, I listen to goofy Asian music from time to time. I’ve been listening to a lot of Yellow Magic Orchestra lately. In fact, I got stuck on YouTube looking at YMO videos. Well, that was after searching for, “Bush Blair Gay Bar.” You’ll see what I mean if you look for that. The original music video by, “Electric Six,” is quite bizarre as well. You’ll see why we call each other, “Superstar,” at work.

I get to go to San Diego next week. I had a heck of a time finding flights and hotels and I really don’t want to go to a, “Microsoft Management Summit,” but it’s part of my job. They pay me and they get to tell me what to do. I don’t know about anyone else, but I hardly have any free time during my business trips. I even find it hard to eat with any regularity. Most conferences I go out to dinner with a group and I get limited time to sleep. Maybe this time I’ll get to hit the gym once or twice because I don’t know anyone who is going. We’ll see. My main goal is to do as much work-related stuff that I can but that’s my problem, isn’t it?

The list of things that cheese me off is pretty long. One thing is working with Microsoft products. Unfortunately for me, Megacorp arbitrarily decided that my job was to work with Microsoft products. Not just the easy ones, but the the awful ones that need whole IT departments to keep them running. This afternoon some Megacorpers decided I needed to go to a Microsoft conference in San Diego next week. NEXT WEEK. Work conferences are supposed to be planned months in advance, not hours.

Another thing that cheeses me off is wasting my time. I was told that I would attend a, “document review meeting,” after filing a, “defect sheet.” Instead of just proofreading a document, I had to write down the line number and page number and describe the, “defect.” A run-on sentence with varying verb tenses, misspellings, and technical errors would require several defects to describe. Seeing as how the author received about half of the document from another company in outline form just after lunch and he sent it to me at 1:30PM, you can understand how rough of a draft it was. Oh, and I had meetings from 10-5 and I’m supposed to proofread this thing by 9:30 tomorrow morning when I’m double-booked in meetings again. It took me 2 hours (from 7:30PM to 9:30PM) to get through 37 out of 67 pages and I gave up. I told them that the document was not ready for review and that I would not be attending the review meeting. Can’t they give me a job I can do and time to do it?

I spent a lot of time flapping my gums at the gym since I haven’t been there in a couple of weeks. I got all sorts of abuse from the staff and one of the women there who looked at my shirt and said, “Superstar?! You’re kind of a freakshow, aren’t you?”

We also had a little Asian gangster thing going. One of the trainers at the gym who I think is Vietnamese had some highlights put in his hair. His client, a Chinese woman, came in and said, “I didn’t know you were Korean.” My comment was, “Hey, did you get a Honda with ground effects and the big R sticker to make it go faster?”

I suppose the best part for me was that the unhappy girl was there. I hadn’t seen her for quite some time. I chatted with her about her odd hours at work. Funny, I think the first thing I ever said to her was, “MARS FACE! MARS FACE!” (I got all excited because the Mars Face was on TV while we were on the elliptical trainers. You can look up Mars Face on Wikipedia if you don’t know what I’m talking about.)

P.S. “Sister Christian” is a song by Night Ranger, a San Francisco 80’s metal band.

For those of you who thought I should see the doctor, I saw the doctor. I rationalized it this way: I wanted to see if my chest was clear, but since I never got into medical school I really had no reason to buy that nice Littman Master Cardiology stethoscope and so I couldn’t listen to my lungs myself, and in any case nobody was going to listen to my batty self-diagnosis with any sense of belief. So I had to have Mr. Dr. Physician do it for me, and while he was at it I was going to have him prescribe me some hay fever medication as well.

My nerdy doctor (one of my peeps) said the cold going around this year seems to present the way I had it: starts with head congestion, ends up in the chest. He thought he heard diminished breath sounds on the right side, so he took an X-ray, which was clear. I came back to the office after my x-ray and had to sit in the room with the sigmoidoscope (THE THING THEY USE TO LOOK UP YOUR POOPER) and I really didn’t want to touch anything in there, not even the chair. He gave me a clean-ish bill of health and gave me some ‘scrips for Flonase and Allegra (hay fever meds) and sent me on my way.

The best part is that I saw the woman I used to have a crush on when I first started at the gym. The one with the big nose. She was walking around the park. Wait, I think that was yesterday, since today it was miserable and wet and nobody was walking around the park. OK, the best part is that the doctor’s Medical Assistant was kind of flirty. That always makes doctor visits more fun.

Just in case you didn’t get your fill of VH-1 (whatever happened to pop-up video?), yesterday I saw that the woman who “Sister Christian” was written about is an office manager in Portland! I might actually KNOW her! A possible brush with fame! I’d rather meet Steve Perry, or John Oates, but you takes what you gets.

I don’t remember what I did today. All I can think about writing about is complaining about work. I think I’ll go to sleep instead.

I started working at Megacorp and I quit swearing so much. I don’t know why, but I just did. But oddly enough, when they changed my job to do something very similar to Windows system administration (though it is only installation and setup) I went back to my system administrator vocabulary. I keep saying, “I need to watch myself,” and “I should calm down,” etc, but this is one of those situations where I’m already sensitized to the inherent climate and any little thing can set me off. It’s like allergies. There’s no way to make myself calm down because the other people are setting me off and I can’t change myself. Maybe I could get hypnotherapy, but I’d rather not.

So I thought I was getting better, but I think my allergies are triggering my coughing fits. It’s an “unproductive cough” meaning nothing is being coughed up as far as I can tell, but it’s also unproductive because I’m unable to do anything while I’m continually coughing. If this doesn’t go away, it really is doctor time. I need to see him about allergy medications anyway. It’s too nice out and I’m sure it’s getting to be time for the stupid plants to start having plant sex.

I have trouble at my job because I actually care about what I’m doing. I also have a low tolerance for stupid people. There’s one guy at work who kept asking me about my schedule and I kept telling him that I had no idea since I’d never seen the program I was supposed to be working on. Nothing has changed but he just keeps asking me the same question. This morning, I even told him, “&*!*$ marketing, what do they know? We need a working computer to figure out how long this will take.” This afternoon he asked me again and again even after I called him a <bad word> moron. I don’t know what persistent questioning is going to do except trigger my utter rage.

The good news (for a co-worker) is that the co-worker, who had been telling our manager that our jobs were nonsense, has found a new job. This gives me a little hope that there are ways out of this group. I’ve had nightmares where I’m the last one left, though.

The term I remember about things like sinus infections is “self-limiting” which means they either get better or you die, and then you won’t care if you have a sinus infection. But really, my nose is fairly clear, my snot isn’t green or bloody, and most of my problems are from the neck down (not including the nuttiness that’s housed in my skull, of course.) I still have a cough and yesterday I had a sore throat. How’s that a sinus infection?

I got up this morning feeling pretty tired and it wasn’t getting better as the morning progressed. I decided to call it another sick day and thought I’d take a quick nap. 7AM – 12AM isn’t what I’d call a quick nap. After I got up I had some more time to install stuff on my sister’s computer. I think I found out the original problem was her programs were too old. Weird, huh? Things change in the OS level and Microsoft made some incompatible change in their latest update. Nice of them. We didn’t have to spend the $55 and two days to do all the stuff we did, but whatever.

So tomorrow it’s back to work. A couple of days ago I was helping one of the project leads, a guy with a Masters degree in Computer Science, with a programming problem he had. As an ex-lab-tutor, I know the sorts of problems they get in 100-level (i.e. college freshman) programming courses and this guy had no clue what he was doing. He couldn’t even do simple binary math. And I can’t get a programming job. There’s something seriously wrong with this picture.

Guess who is reinstalling XP Home AGAIN on his sister’s computer? You can probably guess. I figured out what I was doing wrong yesterday (USB floppy disk stops being recognized in the middle of an installation), but there’s always something else that will screw you with a Dell computer. I guess I can’t say that much because my non-Dell computer started acting up again as well.

I had to leave work early to take a nap because I am BEAT and here it is, close to my bed time, and I’m still working on my sister’s computer. Oh, well. Take a look at the $100 hair cuts on those two:

Megan gave us hair cuts and she knows what she’s doing.

Oh, and to get more cake info for yesterday’s cake picture, ask my sister. All I remember is espresso, shortbread-something, and double or triple or quadruple chocolate. Mmmm, cake.

I suppose I wasn’t at work for a full day because I left early to try to fix my sister’s computer. I was only half-successful at the repair and it took me six hours! I am not enamored of the Dell way of taking perfectly good hardware and twisting it into their own proprietary hell, but I suppose that’s what they do. Oh, and Windows blows, too. In any case, I could be back at this in a couple of days. Work is also not my favorite place to be, either.

And once again, sick boy is not properly convalescing, but he’s up late screwing around. I can’t just come home and hop into bed, for some reason. This morning I had a LARGE VOLUME of boogers draining from my head and I hope this ends soon. I’m sure no one wants to hear about it any more, either. Even worse, my cough is keeping me from the gym, and the gym is what keeps me semi-sane.

I was going to post something more about the trip we took, and how we met Megan’s neighbors and friends as well as people Mariko went to school with, but I’m not sure why I’m still up at this point. I really should be asleep. Well, I should be lying in bed coughing, wishing I was asleep anyway.

Much like I couldn’t figure out the kanji in my stupid camera, I’m having troubles with iPhoto and I can’t figure out how to show you Megan’s three giant cakes. I’m afraid there’s nothing near them to show you just how ginormous they were. The one on the right (if I ever get the picture up here) was a foot and a half tall. Or more.

So the quick story is that my sister and I were down in San Francisco for Megan’s 40th birthday party. I was still a little sick, but we got on a plane around 1PM Saturday and got back past midnight Monday morning. The combined effects of my lingering cold, hay fever, and the switch to daylight savings time were a joy to behold and I may be a complete zombie today. I think I was only in one photograph, and I can only remember taking one which I should post tonight. Cake!