binglemumps

I quote, from the stupid online training course thing I have to finish by end of year (i.e. tomorrow):

‘In a recent poll, Americans rated saving for retirement to be just as difficult as quitting smoking and harder than losing weight.’

What?? From the comparisons made I’m assuming this is referring to a matter of discipline as opposed to ability. So what the heck are people spending their money on?

To spare my normal readers, I’ve procured a separate subdomain for my anime rantings.

Witness: bingerama

I bought a pair of sleeping pants from Ross the other day for $6.99. It’s purple and has prints of huge sunflowers and other tiny white flowers all over it. It is also covered in cursive print that says ‘He Loves Me’ and ‘He Loves Me Not’. So you know. You can kinda tell what the general message here is.

But on closer inspection, you find that there is another set of prints scattered across the pant-scape, in unobtrusive lower case small print - ‘david & goliath’.

WTF???

I’m semi-recovering from alcohol consumption so I’ll allow myself to ramble a bit. Had our holiday dinner at Medjool tonight. I’m not much of a connoisseur as you know, but I thought the food was ok. I find that a lot of times when I go to expensive restaurants I end up thinking the food is just ok.

However. The seared sea scallop might have been the best scallop I’ve ever had. And the bruschetta thing was so good that I even liked the feta cheese on it. And the prommes frites were really poppable (although you’re really paying 7 bucks for a plate of potato chips). And they didn’t overdo the alcohol in the Fuzzy Navel.

I was happy because I made a reservation for 16 people and we really did have exactly 16 people show up. I was told that it was a surprisingly good turn out for a Retirement event. So that was good.

After dinner everyone kinda went home, and only 4 of us stayed to get drinks. I guess we do have to go in to work tomorrow, but I’d gone to dinner with a Friday night mentality already. This was actually the first time I’d hung out with my coworkers without Joe being there. The last two years I’ve barely gone out with them, aside from lunch every day with Joe and Chris. I guess I just grew into the habit of having the two of them there all the time. Over the last few months I’ve grown more comfortable with the other people I work with, and I’m really happy. I think the group of people we have now is the best we’ve had in the time since I started work.

I’m idealistic I know, but I do believe that it’s things like these that keep people together. Joe once commented that the people most likely to leave the company are the ones who don’t go out to lunch or hang out with other people, and that’s got to be true to some extent. I don’t have any loans to pay off or children to take care of right now, and as my mum says, I just don’t know the value of money. So it may be easy for me to say this, but you could never pay me enough to peel me away from the people I work with.

Before I started work, someone older and wiser told me that you never make friends at work; you may think they are friends, but they’re really not. I don’t know what the technical definition of friendship involves and I know that these people might drop out of my life the moment the only thing connecting us vanishes. But whatever it is I have with them, I’m just glad I have it.

Dinner tonight is the chicken katsu + vegetable tempura bento box from Sushi Ko. Taking out bento boxes is always such a huge affair. First there’s the box that has the chicken, salad and california roll. Then the rice box, the soup container and the tempura box. AND three little containers for soy sauce, tempura sauce and katsu sauce. It always makes me feel like I’m having a ten course dinner, except that the dipping sauces are situated in the most undignified places, and the whole affair is so awkward because I just don’t have enough space on my desk.

Sushi Ko is my most frequented Japanese restaurant in the area. Which goes to follow that it’s probably my most frequented Japanese restaurant in the world (which sounds pretty impressive huh). The main reason I favour it so is that I still haven’t found a place that serves raw salmon as heavenly as the salmon they have here. I don’t know why that is because this isn’t supposed to be a particularly good restaurant. Chances are I just don’t really know what good salmon is.

Anyway, despite what the reviews on yelp.com might say, I still really like this place. The service has always been great. The bento boxes are pretty affordable and the portions are generous enough. The chicken katsu and saba shio (my usual bento choices) are really good, as is the vegetable tempura (which I’ve just tried for the first time). They don’t have as many specialty rolls as other places, but I think the regular rolls are pretty well done (for e.g. the aforementioned salmon, the hamachi and red snapper nigiri, and the spicy hotate roll).

My only complaint is that the one time I got the party sushi combination thing, about 1/3 of it consisted of california rolls. The california roll here isn’t bad or anything, but california rolls in general are just kinda cheap. Plus I’m not a huge fan of avocado. In fact, the free california roll that comes with my bento box is about to go uneaten, because I’m already full from the chocolate cupcakes I made this afternoon.

If you ever visit Berkeley for a day and feel like sushi, you probably won’t go to Sushi Ko. I’m practically the only person I know who even knows that this place exists, and the other people who do know seem none too impressed. So much so that I wouldn’t even confidently recommend it myself. What can I say, I guess I just haven’t had enough Japanese food to know any better, and you probably have higher standards than me.

The first good thing that has come out of finishing this bloody exam is that I can now work late without having to worry about all the studying that’s going undone.

…

I’m glad I took last night off and had a little anime marathon instead of last minute cram jam, or I’d actually be upset now.

During the dark days of my job hunting phase, I attended a few infosessions where they had a panel of actuaries from different companies talk about their jobs. And all of them would talk about how tough it is to balance work and studying, how much you have to give up to do it.

I wasn’t completely expecting it (admittedly us Singaporeans have this tendency to dismiss the opinions of Americans when it comes to anything study-related), but it really is as hard as they say it is. I mean, it’s not like I didn’t study my ass off when I was in college. It’s not like I didn’t go through an insanely rigorous exam system when I was growing up. I’m no genius but I know that, even compared to the above average, I’m better than most at taking exams and at studying. And still I’m telling you - sometimes it really, really, hella sucks.

Granted, our hours are nowhere near as bad as an i-banker’s (although I would argue that the comparison is moot considering they get paid 3 or 4 times what we do) , and maybe not as bad as other finance/consulting jobs. The thing is, working till 11 or 12 every day is tough, but working till 7 and then making yourself study at night (and weekends) requires an entirely different kind of discipline. It’s not just about the hours, it’s little things like getting home at 11.30 and having to make the choice between watching 1 epsiode of Hotaru no Hikari and reading a chapter from my ERM textbook before I hit the sack. It’s living with the mindset that your default state is studying and any free time spent doing anything else is something to be guilty about.

I had a really bad month+ a while back, trying to finish up the reading and assignments for my current exam. The structure is such that you have 5 online modules with an assignment at the end of each, then an exam that covers all the material. Each module takes 50-60 hours, so a comfortable pace is about one module per month. I started studying at the end of August and I was trying to hit the end of November submission deadline. A lot of unexpected work started coming up at the same time, it was weeks on end of being the last one in the office.

I got really mad during that time. I don’t mind working long hours every day, if there’s work to be done. I don’t mind giving up personal time to study. But the thought that I might not make the deadline despite all the effort, because work was just not allowing me to…It just seemed unfair. I was all bitter during Halloween. I had worked the weekend and it seemed so inconceivable that people could take hours off working and studying to go attend parties and stuff. And then I spent Thanksgiving down with the flu in Boston, and having to work on the worst module exercise ever created with a crazy headache and a nose that had been blown so many times it was about to fall off.

Still, I’m really glad I made it. I could have given up any time, since it wouldn’t have been a huge delay if I’d decided on the next sitting instead. But I just couldn’t do it, not after all the work I’d already put in. I didn’t want to lose. Oh foolish pride! And technically it’s not even over yet. The exam itself is in 4 days, and I might very well fail because I haven’t really been able to restart my studying engines since I took a break after submitting the last assignment. It’s ok though. Even if I fail, I think managing to do the almost-impossible (albeit pointless) is still some kind of minor victory. =)

To be honest, it’s been a lot less tough on me because I have no family and very few friends here. It would have been absolutely undoable for someone with a social life. That’s why I think we’re pricks sometimes, when we interview people. We’re always trying to make sure that the people we interview have interests outside of just Math and studying, and personally I’m a huge advocate of that too. But the truth is, this job would be so much easier for someone who didn’t have anything else to do with their time and didn’t want to do anything but study. It’s as if we know they’re going to have to sacrifice something, and we want the sacrifice to be hard for them.

At one of those infosessions I went to, I distinctly remember what one of the consultants there (whom, incidentally, I ended up working for - and practically worship - now) said: you spend what should have been the best 10 years of your life wondering if it’s all worth it, and at the end of it when you finally get your FSA, that’s when you realise that it was. At the time, I thought to myself, what’s the point if you’re not happy during those 10 years?

Thankfully, it’s not really like that. Any job can get frustrating I guess, and at this point I can’t see myself doing anything but this. Even if we’re grossly underpaid (this is the first year I’m getting a bonus, and if I hit my billable goal it’s going to be a whooping 2%, gg) and no one outside really knows how cool and important our job actually is! If I had an easier job I’d probably feel like I was selling myself out. Plus I absolutely adore everyone I work with (although I would never openly admit that), and that’s saying quite a bit considering what a judgemental bitch I can be. =p

Time to turn off the whining and check on my peanut soup.

So I’m watching my anime with Chinese subs, and I’m trying to figure out if I could possibly try to translate this. How do people do it? Nevermind the uncommon terms like ‘taishi’ and ‘taisou’ which I wouldn’t even know where to begin translating into Chinese OR English (apparently ‘taishi’ is roughly equivalent to ‘Grand Preceptor’ wtf??). How about Chinese proverby things like ‘yi cun guang yin’ or ‘dang ju zhe mi’? I could kinda work out a literal translation I guess, but I absolutely cannot think of an English proverby equivalent.

Which leads me to the conclusion that, not only does my Chinese suck, apparently so does my English. =(

So cute! I’d hug him too:

Twelve Kingdoms is becoming pretty addictive. Once you get past the first 4 or 5 episodes where the protagonist bursts into tears at the most inappropriate moments, she becomes such a trooper that the character development is pretty unrealistic. No complaints, of course - I’d rather they sped the process up unnaturally than have us sit through 200 episodes of teenage angst.

Fortunately, this is taking some heat off my Saiunkoku Monogatari obsession, which I have been trying to satiate by downloading Chinese subs (that desperate, yes). Today my fellow Saiunkoku fan (whom will henceforth be referred to as FSF because publicly disclosing that he likes this anime would detract from his manly image) suggested that I make my own English subs using the Chinese ones.

I actually considered this until I went home and re-watched an episode I’d seen last night, this time with the Chinese subs on. And discovered that my Chinese is in a completely Cannot Make It state. In my defense, if the show had a contemporary setting I probably would have been ok. But I have enough trouble understanding how ancient Chinese emperors speak even through listening, much less when I’m trying to read 10 words per second with names of obscure provinces mixed in for good measure.

Anyway, we’ll see if this anime sustains my interests long enough past my bloody exam. The other day I was chatting with coworker SW, who mentioned that she’d once tried subbing a drama all by herself (translation, timing, encoding) and gave up after less than 1 episode because it was just too much work. If I’m still obsessed when I have a ton of time on my hands, maybe it’ll be a good excuse to watch the same episodes 20,143 times. =p Take heart, FSF!

I was starving today, when I picked up lunch at the Chinese fast food restaurant across the street. I’m not very rational when I’m hungry. So instead of the usual fried noodles + tofu, I got fried noodles + tofu + bok choy (as part of my bid to eat ‘healthy’ lawl).

1/4 through the meal I decided I’d had enough. This always happens. Food always sounds so good when it’s as yet unattained, and then when it’s actually in front of you, 70% of the time it disappoints. So I put the food away in the fridge, and on the way back to my cube I realise I’m actually not that full.

…

To be honest, I’m pretty sure the leftovers are going to end up in the bin. Sometimes I think I’m really easy going and un-picky when it comes to most things in life. But sometimes I’m just a food-wasting, fickle little brat.

Be prepared for a deluge of posts while I catch up on a few months worth of raving.