Buffet

Tonight, Gramma and I decided to check out the East Buffet in Flushing. My parents were considering going there because of the good things they'd heard about it. All you can eat, which includes Peking Duck, steak, and steamed lobster for only $15 per person.
I'll admit, the Peking Duck was really good. The steamed lobster, on the other hand, was completely not worth it. First, people were fighting for it - literally fighting. A new tray would come out every 5 minutes or so and the moment the tray was set down, people would start swarming until it was empty, which took approximately 20 seconds. I didn't feel like fighting for it so I stood in line for the Peking Duck instead and watched the mayhem. It was ridiculous to see some people walk away with a plate piled high with lobster claws. Gramma decided to try for some lobster at one point and she made the mistake of waiting patiently while the tray was getting set into the buffet. I watched some guy pretty much shove her to the side while making a grab for the stupid lobster. Well, Gramma successful got away with a few pieces. I was a little disappointed with the results. The lobster was overly salty and it was stringy. Not too sure why people were so crazy about it.
O, and some little old lady shoved in front of me in the line for Peking Duck. She just wheedled in and refused to look at me. I don't care how old you are lady, you should at least say excuse me.
Dessert was good though, Gramma and I each had a little chocolate cup filled with strawberry and banana. Yum!

Observation

After a client meeting and watching "Cinderella Man," I wonder, who runs things? Where are the actual creators on the totem pole? The architect doesn't actually do the work, it's the associates and interns that do the actual designing, and yet they don't receive credit. At meetings, we all take the back seat while Big Cheese puts on a show. In "Cinderella Man," the fighter is down and out during the great depression while the people who set up the show sit back and relax in their cushy chairs.
It seems like the producers, the ones who do the actual work, are there to get stepped on. The ones who organize and talk and manage are the ones who will always reap the benefits. Shouldn't it be those who do the actual work who should be getting the reward for it?

Huh?

I woke up this morning at 6:30 am to someone pounding on our door. I shuffled on over in my muddled state and opened it to see the doorman and some little old lady. Doorman told me in Mandarin that there was a huge leak coming from the ceiling of the little old lady's apartment. I'm not entirely sure how to respond to that, so I just stand there. Then, Doorman thinking I don't understand Mandarin, switches into some other dialect and tries again. Gramma crawls out of bed and tells them to come in. We show them the bathrooms. See? We're not running any water, neither of us have even flushed a toilet since last night. It's not our water. Doorman and little old lady leave. I get ready for work since I lost that last precious 15 minutes, and Gramma with her insomnia goes to the living room to watch tv because she can't go back to sleep.

After three days of working from 9am till midnight, I was a little peeved.

Monogamy?!

After a few months of frustratingly long and boring commutes and not being able to play music out loud while building models, I finally broke down and bought myself an iPod Shuffle - the red one! I set it up on my sister's computer and everything was fine. Later, when I hooked it up to my computer, it said something about how the music isn't authorized on my computer and would therefore have to be deleted. At work on Sunday (yes, work on Sunday) I asked one of my coworkers what that was about, since everyone has had iPods for years except for my family.
I have a monog-iPod.
Shuffles have strange authorization settings that other iPods don't where if the new computer doesn't have the song on it already, then the song on the shuffle has to go, too. I knew that orange nano was calling me for a reason. I should've bought myself a sluttier iPod...

In other news, our central Revit file has corrupted and we're frantically trying to repair it. Fun!

I'm lonely.

Gym

I joined Crunch gym when Gramma told me I look fat. I don't really think I got all that much fatter, I just think that I'm not as toned as I'd like to be. But anyway, I digress. I took the hip hop class today. Normally, when I take hip hop, I feel very much like an awkward chicken. Fortunately, this hip hop guy is a jazz dancer, so it was something I could figure out.
Odd thing about gyms, they're filled with guys just checking girls out. Everywhere I walked, I could see guys blatantly staring - at me, at the half-naked tattooed girl that just passed by. It's like a hunting ground where overly muscular men look for suitably anorexic girls to salivate over. Fascinating. I'll stick to the dance classes. And maybe try out that elliptical machine...after I get something to listen to music with...

Happy Mid Autumn

Happy belated Mid-Autumn Festival! My gramma received a gigantic box of moon cakes and this Taiwanese mung-bean shallot and meat dumpling thing called Lu-Dou Pung. They're yummy.
Gramma and I went to a Japanese/Korean place for lunch. By Flushing standards, it's a relatively expensive place (What?! $9 for 6 kimchi appetizers, a gigantic bowl of food and a bowl of soup?! Preposterous!). I had bibimbap and Gramma had a seafood tofu thing with red bean rice. We had some nice conversation about random things. She can be a pretty cool gramma sometimes. The lady next to us ate an entire mackeral, soup, rice and appetizers. I figure the enormous appetite was because she was very pregnant and was eating for two.
Later, I met up with Julia, a nice lady I met at one of the alum meetings. She was getting her hair done in Flushing so we went to a Shanghai-nese restaurant that my parents love to go to. Fortunately, Julia enjoyed it a lot as well. There was lots of chatting, mostly about work and boys (I suppose man problems plague women of all ages) and then, since she could speak Chinese, I dragged her home so I could give her a couple moon cakes. We stood around and chatted with Gramma who she later deemed as a cool gramma. Gramma is most pleased.

Stranded

New York is a lonely city. You're surrounded by so many people, but because the culture is to turn inwards and people don't speak to each other on the streets, you might as well be alone. You make of it what you will, and you go out and try to meet new people. It's so tiring to meet new people. I'm glad I have Estee and my cousins. I'm glad I know Christina's around and Marlen's around somewhere, and some classmates that I talk to. I'm glad that some of the girls at work occasionally spend off hours going to a show or a dance class with me. I just feel this constant nagging and I fear it's a growing dissatisfaction with distance. It didn't bother me so much when I was in Pittsburgh and everything was fast-paced, draining and I lived with friends who I could chat and argue with at the end of the day. But now, just living with my grandmother who I have to hide things from and pretend to be a good little girl...I really need to get back into the swing of things somehow.

Today on the train, a little old Chinese lady and I were both standing. When a seat opened up, I waved her towards it and she laughed and shook her head telling me to take it. When another space opened up, she finally took the seat, knowing I wouldn't be stranded because of her. And then when we got off at the last stop, I helped her figure out where she was trying to get to. I suppose there's small things like that that make New York a little less lonely.

Flipped

On a whim today, and because someone at Meebo so conveniently provided the link, I decided to retake the Meyers-Briggs personality test. I recall taking it in high school, back when I was a homebody, and getting INTP - aka, the architect. How appropriate that I went to architecture school. Except that now, I realize that when they say, "Architect," they're referring to Howard Roark, Starchitect. Uh, no.
Well, to continue, I retook the test twice just now, once where there was no gray-area option allowed, and then a different test where the option existed. The first one, I ended up with ESFJ which is completely the direct opposite of INTP. Has college really changed me that much? The second test I took made a lot more sense to me (http://www.kisa.ca/personality/) and I ended up with ENFJ, and strongly so. Apparently ENFJ is called "the Teacher." I figure the description of it is mostly correct concerning myself, but I'd hardly call myself popular.

On another note, we had a forum discussion yesterday about the redesign of our company website. I strongly advocated the addition of a company blog that would exist in the form of a journal of various cultural activities attended by people in the firm. So far, the bosses seem to be really going for the idea. Score!

Commute

This morning, I thought I had it perfect. I left perfectly on time, made it to the station even faster than usual, got a seat in a nice corner. The express went smoothly until 61st-Woodside, when all of a sudden, we came to the stop and just sat there. The emergency brakes on the express train in front of us got stuck, so we had to wait and then reroute to the local track. Then, at the next stop, we came to a stop and just stopped. I wondered what was going on and why all the doors remained closed. Then, I realized that I was sitting across from the conductors booth and could therefore listen in on everything people were saying. Apparently, someone had decided to choose this morning's rush hour for his heart attack and it happened to be on my train. Crap. So, after 20 minutes and a stretcher later, we started back up again. And I ended up at work 15 minutes late. Crap.

Let the Schoolin' Begin

The public schools started classes today. I noticed an unusually large amount of people in the subways as well as walking around on the streets this morning. Darn...I guess this is what it's going to be like until June.
Cute thing I saw on the 6 train - in a forest of tall business men, a teenage boy in "gangsta" clothing tightening the backpack straps and fixing the glasses on his kid brother and then saying to him, "You think this is bad, wait till we get on the S-train."

Quick! Hide the Laundry!

Sitting here with my gramma, parents and uncle and aunt, I find that they sure do chat about the funniest things. They just had an hour-long conversation about the merit of tatami floors versus beds, and who had the most comfortable beds and which hotels had the better beds. They've since moved on to coffee makers and blankets.
Meanwhile I hid in the room and completely reorganized the closet and the drawers. Before leaving for the holiday weekend, I hid as much of my laundry as possible so my grandmother wouldn't decide to be the martyr-servant-grandmother who does all the laundry. Sure enough, the few articles I left in the hamper (for bait, to convince her I wasn't trying to hide all my clothes from her) were washed and tossed into the closet in various states of rumpliness. My parents show up, see that she did my laundry and of course, yelled at me for making gramma do my laundry....It's not like I went, "Here, Gramma. My laundry is dirty - wash it!" God...And in fact, it's preferable that she doesn't do it because we have different opinions on what can be put in the dryer and things inexplicably shrink. Worse yet, she also reorganizes all the hangers so pants are on the triangle hangers (wierd little bumps on the hip!) and my really nice dresses are on wire hangers and random shirts are hanging on the hangers with clips which are for the pants...no idea why she does that. I'm glad my mum wouldn't mix things up into wierd hangers, and considering I'm more anal than she is about my clothes, at least she doesn't wash things that I prefer to wash myself.