man, i just had the worst phone interview ever, with my mom's own company. the interviewer was asking questions about stuff that i learned in college, but i kept blanking and couldn't remember anything, so he kept dumbing questions down, but i still couldn't answer them.

interviewer: so what can you tell me about deriving the coefficients of an ARIMA(2, 2) model and using them to forecast?
me: gah?
interviewer: hm...let's move on to data structures. what's the most common order of retrieval in a hash map?
me: er...geh?
interviewer: i see. so in your engineering economics class, did you learn how to do continuous compound rates?
me: uh...e to the...guh?
interviewer: what's one plus one?
me: ...
me: i wash myself with a rag on a stick

haha, sorry jesse, i recycled some lines. here's one more: i've resigned myself to sitting in my loft in my parents new condo and eating peanuts all summer. i'm also considering changing my name to mr peepers.

so we have an unnamed friend who's having an issue with this guy she kinda likes who's been spending a lot of time with this other girl. she's discussing it with jesse, and then as if it was relevant AT ALL, she asks him, 'i mean, how would you feel if you saw pete hanging out a lot with some other girl?'

another quote:
me: yay, game 1 [nets-spurs] is finally here
bing: yeah, seriously
bing: too bad i'm gonna be at the justin timberlake concert tonite

how the freak did bing get married? to a woman??

please, come visit me. i'll have plenty of room, and peanuts.

first quotes ever postBHOT, freudian slips from jesse:

j: i need to find someone i feel comfortable with and who shares my interests
j: i can't be a girl forever

j: gotta go, installing dead IAM
j: err, dead AIM

j: i like a girl in fifth grade

haha...ask mister wordsworth himself if you wanna know what he was really trying to say with those...

a motherly quote:

mom, to my sister on her birthday: you're 25 and ben's 25, so the two of you added together are still 1 less than me

i just picked up the book no man is an island by thomas merton...it's pretty gripping already. From a couple pages in:

This matter of 'salvation' is, when seen intuitively, a very simple thing. But when we analyze it, it turns into a complex tangle of paradoxes. We become ourselves by dying to ourselves. We gain only what we give up, and if we give up everything we gain everything. We cannot find ourselves within ourselves, but only in others, yet at the same time before we can go out to others we must first find ourselves. We must forget ourselves in order to become truly conscious of who we are. The best way to love ourselves is to love others, yet we cannot love others unless we love ourselves since it is written, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.' But if we love ourselves in the wrong way, we become incapable of loving anybody else. And indeed when we love ourselves wrongly we hate ourselves; if we hate ourselves we cannot help hating others. Yet there is a sense in which we must hate others and leave them in order to find God. Jesus said: 'If any man come to me and hate not his father anid his mother...yea and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.' As for this finding of God, we cannot even look for Him unless we have already found Him, and we cannot find Him unless he has first found us. We cannot begin to seek Him without a special gift of His grace, yet if we wait for grace to move us, before beginning to seek Him, we will probably never begin.

The only effective answer to the problem of salvation must therefore reach out to embrace both extremes of a contradiction at the same time. Hence that answer must be supernatural. That is why all the answers that are not supernatural are imperfect: for they only embrace one of the contradictory terms, and they can always be denied by the other.

wow that was long...deep tho...like the grand canyon...

quote n + m + r + q from the BHOT:

talking about a certain nameless girl:
pete: i don't get it, why do so many guys like her? is it like wanting to conquer unconquered territory or something?
eric: actually i think she's already been conquered a lot

please direct all further inquiries to eric huang.

another motherly vignette:

last may when my parents flew out here for my graduation, my mom couldn't stop playing foosball, she was addicted. it was like mom we're eating dinner; hold on, one more game...mom it's time for church; ok after i score...mom i'm graduating now; no, tell them to wait... (i might be exaggerating). anyways, it got to the point where she even started trash-talking me...i tried to be nice and ignore it, but she was relentless, and in the end i was goaded into destroying her...of course i felt immensely guilty afterwards.

the moral: i guess even my mom's susceptible to that bit of evil that girls pull on guys when they're competing, where if the guy's losing they make fun of him and call him unmanly names, and if he's winning, they cry injustice and call him a bully. evil.

another story about my mom:

when i was in my early teens i had a penchant for accidentally destroying things...it got to the point where i'd walk into our living room and the pictures would fall off the wall. so one day i was sitting at the kitchen table, probably going through one of those 2nd grade level handwriting books my mom used to force me to fill out (up through high school), when she walked by carrying a big tray of muffins and dropped them all on the floor. naturally when she spotted me sitting innocently at the kitchen table she started yelling at me and (probably) made me go outside to pick up sticks in our backyard (we lived in a forest).

the moral: thought i forgot about that one, didn't you, mom? =)

well, now that it's been confirmed that my parents read this somewhat regularly, i'm gonna have to tell embarrassing stories about them.

when i was in junior high (i think), for christmas one year my sister and me bought our mom a cat-in-the-hat beanie; it was a regular beanie with a big cat-in-the-hat figurine protruding from the front of it like a horn...we gave it to her as a joke but she wore it to and from her job on wall street everyday. this encouraged me to look for fubu gear to get her next year, unfortunately i couldn't get my hands on any. this past winter break, i left my puffy blue-black jacket that i got at foot locker at my parents' house in philly by accident, and my mom told me my dad's been wearing it around. i wonder if he wears it over his favorite outfit, dark green corduroys and blue flanel shirt with black splotches.

the moral: now you see where i get my fashion sense from?

it's april! you know what it's time for!

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

awesome...i think i get too much joy out of that verse, and it takes away from the tragibittersweeticity factor.

bing is married!! some of his last words to me as a single man: 'pete, whenever you come visit, there'll always be an extra room...for melissa'

i shaved my head again, stupid ncaa tournament. you know what, my life seems very cyclical. i bet i could go to the archives and copy and paste stuff that i posted here a year ago and it'd still work. well hopefully not...let's see, i think my love of food has increased, and i'm not in school anymore...i haven't had any toe nails fall out this year...i guess i'm a whole different person.

i'm reading a book on china and it's talking about the boxer uprising in the early 1900s. what happened was large numbers of chinese peasants and other poor chinese rose up against foreigners in their country, especially missionaries and their chinese converts. when the uprising reached peking, all the foreigners and missionaries in the city banded together and retreated into a defensive area consisting of the british, russian, german, japanese, and american compounds and tried to defend themselves from the boxers. i wonder what would have been the right thing for a christian to do...would it be to not resist and not to fight and defend your family and simply be killed by the boxers?

a parallel would be when the early christians were killed by the romans and didn't resist, but the difference is that that was the roman government, and the bible says God appoints all civil authority, which means to obey their laws even to death, though not to stop preaching the gospel. however, the persecution of christians during the boxer uprising was not from the government (even though the boxers had the support of the evil empress dowager of the time) but rather from ordinary chinese who took matters into their own hands. so what should christians in the western defensive compound in peking have done, especially with other westerners fighting around them, trying to save their lives?

this particular situation confuses me because it seems to fall into a category between war and persecution of christians.

Hosea 7:5 - 'Throw out your calf-idol, O Samaria! My anger burns against them. How long will they be incapable of purity?'

Hosea 7:14 - 'They do not cry out to me from their hearts but wail upon their beds.'


ug

here's a picture of what i did to dave when we were getting off the lift while snowboarding last week, if he's jason kidd and i'm george lynch.

I scored a 87% on the "How Jersey Are You?" Quizie! What about you?