binglemumps

Had to attend a seminar in LA today. First of all I was bloody bored the night before (*cough* tim *cough*)  especially cos my anime streaming site was down. I did manage to finally watch the South Park episode about WoW, during which I couldn’t get over the little details that just didn’t make sense in context of the game - like, there are no human hunters, you can’t just gank someone in Elwynn, and you can’t get even 2 xp from grey mobs!!! - but it was very entertaining nevertheless. I almost went to bed at 8.30 cos I was so bored, but I ended up doing some work instead.

Then the seminar itself was super boring. The only good thing about it is after this, assuming that I pass my exam, I can be B Luo, ASA instead of just B Luo. How cool is that right. How many people do you know have letters after their names, huh? After June (hopefully) you can add one more person to that no doubt tiny list!!

On the bright side, I think I’ve got a lot better at making meaningless conversation with total strangers. It’s not one of my favourite pastimes because most people are just not that interesting. I’m definitely still no good at socialising in larger groups though. I know what the problem is - it’s because I don’t think I have enough to say that people would be interested in listening to. I don’t have all the repository of exciting stories or funny anecdotes that seem so abundant in other people. Either my life is really dull to begin with or I have a really bad memory.

Then there’re these people whose lives are just as pathetic as mine, but they don’t realise it. So they bore the rest of us with their inconsequential little tales and think we care about, for example, how the weather was in Arizona that one time they visited. And the rest of us are forced to make the obligatory agreeable noises and pretend to amused or intrigued. Ugh. Shut up already dude!

Today after I got off the plane I experienced the Smelly Plane Syndrome again. I always feel like I smell bad after I get off a plane. It’s one of the reasons I hate flying (incidentally, I mentioned to someone that I hate flying the other day, and they had the audacity to suggest that I was afraid of flying. Tamade! Bet I’ve flown more miles in the last year than your entire life put together punk). Anyway, I didn’t think that a 1.5 hour plane ride would produce the Smelly Plane Syndrome, but I guess I was wrong. Gah I hate planes. Hate hate hate.

While I’m at it I’ll comment on the fact that I took Virgin America for the first time, and there seems to be a bit more leg space than usual, but the black leather and white plastic looked a lot nicer in the pictures. IRL they look a bit cheap, and the plane seemed to move an extra lot during take off, landing and turbulence, which kinda added to the whole cheap feeling. But the flight attendants were nice? Not that you get much competition with UA or AA when it comes to that…

Now that I’m rid of all that negative energy I can retire happily to my wonderful wonderful bed!

After spending the whole week expecting to slog the whole weekend away on my no-end-in-sight project, today at 5.30pm we found out that the consultant felt so bad for us that she got someone else to slog the weekend in our place! So now I have TWO WHOLE DAYS of NO STUDY and NO WORK. WHAT WILL I DO!

It was quite overwhelming when I found out. I was quite lost. S was saying maybe we’ll end up going to work anyway cos we won’t know where else to go. But now that it’s sunk in I’m very very happy. I can get my hair cut! And go to the gym twice! And bake chocolate cupcakes! And watch a lot a lot of anime and sleep like 12 hours a day. Omg!

What I’ve learned this past hellish week or two (or three or four) is that I must really love my job. As I have been complaining to every living breathing person I’ve had contact with, I had to burn my last weekend going crazy over my 96-hour exam, had a few days where I slept 2-4 hours and worked the rest of the time - like, literally, aside from commuting and showering I didn’t do anything but work - and still it’s never crossed my mind that I want to quit and do something else. And even though this project has pretty much ruined my life for the past month, I’m still glad I got to work on it. It’s super complex and stuff that a lot of people are not familiar with, and I learned a lot a lot, and it’s just so cool to be involved in something that’s quite a big deal.

I realise that I’ve only been talking about work lately. I’ve become such a boring person. But it’s ok, cos now I can spew out things like section 414(q) and 410(b) and people will be like wow she’s the l33tz0rs!

My nice new phone has been very new and nice, except that today I let it run out of battery and it’s been stubbornly refusing to turn on while it’s charging. Which is precisely the complaint py had about this phone before I bought it, and I’m beginning to see what a pain it is. I want to go to sleep so I can get in to work early tomorrow, but I have to wait till my phone can turn on since I use it as an alarm clock…so here I am stuck blogging because I don’t want to study.

So so so tired. At work I commented that at least I’d managed to get a proper weekend (which means I got to study instead of work hah), and S said he did too, which is precisely why we’re paying for it now. A week or less before exams and there we are still stuck at work at 8pm, as if we hadn’t billed the shit out of April already. The other day someone told me that this is a very easy job to hate. I never thought about it that way because I still like the work I’m actually doing, but it gets so hella frustrating sometimes. I mean, there have been days on end where we work until we can’t work anymore, then we wake up and work some more, and you lose track of the days because you did the exact same thing over the weekend as you did every other day of the week. And we don’t get OT pay or comp days or bonus, it’s all we can do to scrape together some time to take study days so we don’t fail our bloody exams. Like, f*** man. We’re just trying to fricking study here.

Sigh. I know I’ve complained about this before, but the only thing that’s changed since then is that now almost everyone else is suffering the same thing, which I guess is good in some ways but bad in most. The worst part is that my coworkers are the most important thing to me in my job and I have a feeling that most of them aren’t going to be sticking around for much longer. =’(

And my phone is STILL not turning on. UGHGHGHG.