killbam.net

I’ve got a problem. I like writing on Twitter much more than I like writing on this blog. I am actually pleased that it exists and I think that 140 characters is the superior blogging format.

Now, let me help you get something straight here. I know damn well that 99% of Twitter is crap. Most people mistakenly respond to Twitter’s prompt “What are you doing?” with what they are actually doing at the time. Eating, lamenting the weather, being depressed. I do not care.

In fact, really only follow @Waiyeecita, @Perrymecium, and @CobaltIfinity. They’re my 1%. “Johnny Depp looks even more like Elijah Wood in IMAX 3D than he does on the posters. If nothing else, see it for the Tron Preview”. That little tidbit of information is actually something I wanted to know, something that doesn’t warrant a blog post, and probably wouldn’t come up in conversation considering that this is real life and not Seinfeld.

Beyond passively partaking, I like writing. This is because most of the hatred that I want to archive in the cloud for all of time is already instantaneous and under 140 characters. “Quentin Tarantino should have won Best Director for most Nazi’s killed in a movie,” is all I wanted to say. It’s still relevent a day later, but I probably wouldn’t have been motivated to say it if I had to wait or if I had to write a coherent post.

Tweets are not without thought either. Like I’m sure my 1% does, I pause for a bit to think about each tweet that I send out. It’s a punchline. How do I make it fit? Is this how I want to say it? This might make me a tool, but since I already have a blog, I don’t think it really matters.

I’m fresh off Team USA’s loss to the Canadian ice hockey team in the Olympics, so excuse me if I sound a little more cynical than normal.

But sports do nothing but break my heart.

The Cubs almost making the playoffs, the Illini losing to North Carolina, the Bears forgetting they were at the superbowl, and now Team USA all make for a very dismal sport-watching-career for me.  It’s not like I watch sports a lot, I only tune in for the big games where one of my guys is in it.  But I still get riled up!  And no matter what, I almost always have my dreams shattered.

Getting emotionally invested in a game must be bad luck.  Even Apolo Ohno, my half-asian brother, got unfairly DQ’d when I started to watch his races and trailed behind the Canadians in the relay.  The only difference is that I was watching.

Still, the Olympics are pretty awesome.  I’m a little bit more inspired to be the best in the world at…. well… something.  I’ve got competition fever in me in short.  I don’t care what it is, I want to win.  Could I maybe be the best developer my company has ever seen?  Really good at school?  A Starcraft II master?  As long as I’m not watching myself, then it’s possible.

One of my co-workers is trying to place her grandkid in a martial art, and asking another one of my co-workers (a 4th degree black belt in Karate who looks like Benjamin Franklin) which martial art is the best and this and that. Eavesdropping on them, it’s a bit painful to hear Ben explain that my co-worker’s 6 year old grandkid is just going to waste a contract’s worth of payments messing around in a dojo daycare. Charmingly, the woman doesn’t get it.

“Is Hapkido a good one?”
 ”Uh yea… it’s good but what you’ve really got to-”
“Oh never mind, it starts at 6:00 instead of 6:30″

This is the most recent of my interactions with people who have grand aspirations for their kids. I had dinner with one of Wai’s friends who is shopping her 5 year old around private school programs, taking tests to determine whether or not the kid is gifted. Guess not.

I mean, I DO understand the mentality, but at what point do the parents give up and just admit their kid is normal? She kept insisting that the kid was an early reader, but I was too nice to retort that apparently reading early isn’t correlated with being gifted. If it were my kid, I’d just beat smarts into them the Asian way and then let the schools sort it out.