toastykitten

Japanese TV blog. How awesome is that?

My Dale Carnegie class is almost over. Next week will be our last session, and I've decided to make double-fudge chocolate brownies for everyone. It's been a fun ride, and very useful, but I'm looking forward to having my Wednesday nights back.

My cell phone number is dead. My new cell phone is coming in this week. I decided to sign up with Sprint for their "fair and flexible" plan, because I can get 400 anytime minutes and my nights start at seven instead of nine, which will definitely be a relief. I can call people across the country now! I considered joining Cingular for a few days, because that's what Mark is under, but their plans are ridiculously priced, and don't offer any really good benefits.

I've decided to accept some more responsibilities at work, now that the other person is gone. Man, people are hitting me up for dirt about his departure, but I can't. It would be disrespectful to him anyway. My manager is considering hiring someone for my position (and we'll see what happens to me later).

I finished Selected Fictions by Jorges Luis Borges last week, and started Selected Poems by Jorges Luis Borges this week. I have become so anal retentive about my reading that I'm actually reading the poems in Spanish first, then the English translation. Needless to say, I haven't gotten very far, but I think I get a better sense of the poetry anyway. Since I'm forcing myself to re-read the lines until they make sense in both languages, it slows me down enough to take it in.

I'm the same way with manga. I prefer reading manga in Chinese, not because I'm trying to show off or anything, but because I read English too quickly, and I'll gloss over the pictures in order to get to the next scrap of dialogue. If I'm reading in Chinese, I'll spend my time figuring out the characters and their dialogues from the drawn actions.

I had my 6th Dale Carnegie session yesterday. We practiced speaking "impromptu", which I actually found quite useful. I think I'm finding the public speaking aspect of this class the most helpful. My biggest problem with the two-minute time limit is that I never hit it. I'm always ending my talks way early, and I wonder if that's because I am just a very concise person, or if there is something I'm forgetting that I should add in. Hmm...

I'm making friends with the scientist girl. I wonder if I should invite her and her husband to Korean BBQ? (Which, by the way, anyone else wanna join?) I think she's a few years older than me, but we're both the youngest in the class.

I know people say that money doesn't buy happiness, but you know what it does buy? Freedom from worry. I am so much less stressed out these days now that I know for sure I can take care of myself, and take care of my family if they need it, too.

I watched Black.White. Did they do a search for the "DUMBEST WHITE MAN IN AMERICA" or what? I read an article in the LA Times (I'll dig it up later) and apparently no one learned anything, people questioned the "reality" of the reality show (oh that never happens!), if people did things differently because the cameras were obvious, the staginess of certain things, and the Ice Cube theme really really sucks.

The white guy, Bruno, did not even look like a black guy. He looked Indian to me. And he is the dumbest guy in America - he thinks all black people need to do to defeat racism is "be polite and respectful". (OH MY GOD! WHY DIDN'T WE THINK OF THAT?) I think he was the guy on NPR that irritated me. The white woman just looked awful in the black makeup and looked like she was part of a minstrel show. Her daughter, Rose, looked pretty convincing. You know what's funny? So they have her attend this slam poetry class, and have her read a poem that she writes. First of all, she reads her poem from her Mac iBook, which is so weird, when everyone else brought paper. She didn't have a printer?

Second of all, her poetry was really provocative. I kind of wonder what she was thinking, even if I think her writing was actually really good. And how old is she?? She looks fourteen! What do I remember most from her poem? "Sticky fantastic".

Yup, "sticky fantastic".

Apparently mine is still up. I haven't touched it since last year. I edited it a little, and I only have one friend on it. I looked at some of the data you could put in and got thoroughly creeped out by the add your "size" and "height" questions. The fuck? Also, they don't list my high school. I guess we're too ghetto.

I tried uploading a picture, but the file size was too big. Oh well; I probably don't want my face plastered over the Intarweb anyway.

Work is driving me crazy. We're doing audits, right? Only this time, everyone's basically auditing my work from last year, and the guy who's directly above me, the one who trained me on this stuff, keeps coming up to me, going, "Kim? How are you doing this random thing that the auditors will look at?" I tell him how I've been doing it, and he keeps telling me, "Oh, we're actually supposed to be doing it this way." I wanted to say, "Well, you could have told me that when you were TRAINING ME LAST YEAR, right?" Arrgh. So I've been going back the past few months, double-checking all my work to make sure they conform to the standard he only informed me yesterday of, when I thought I'd been keeping to the standard all along. These are really minor, nitpicky things, but they matter to the auditors.

I had a Dale Carnegie session this week. It was all right; it seems like the class suddenly got halved. I think some people might have dropped out. I stumbled over the talks I gave; we were supposed to do a one minute speech on something that required a lot of action, and a two-minute speech about a lesson we learned in our professional life that we had "earned the right to talk about". They want us to do gestures and get really animated, and I am just not a very expressive person. It's not like I speak in a monotone, but unless I am actually excited about something, it's hard for me to have anything other than a pretty blank expression.

Well, there's one other girl who's having the same problem I am. She's some sort of grad student scientist, who's attending with her husband. I actually think she's been performing pretty well, but her voice doesn't inflect much.