I was talking to my cousin today, and he said that his friends had met my mom at some kinda Taiwanese dinner banquet or something and thought she was kind of fierce and intimidating. And his friends said that after meeting my mom, they suspect that she's the reason why my personality is the way it is- that is: fearful, afraid, shy, hesitant all the time. It's weird, I never chalked it up to that; I've blamed a hundred other things, but this sounds just as plausible as anything else. Hmmmm, definitely something to think about (and report to a shrink in the future, HAH!) In truth though, I'm sure it was a combination of things.

Crotch Rocketeer. So I took (& passed) a motorcycle safety class last weekend (2 and a half days long), and in the state of Nevada, that entitles me to the motorcycle endorsement on my driver's license. Not bad for $100. Seriously though, the test was kind of a joke, like how can you seriously say we're ready for the streets after just that?? I guess they figure the fear of death will keep you off the roads until you're ready... or at least it'll be a form of natural selection, hah!

Anyways, so I've been riding my brother's old Kawasaki Ninja 250cc that's been sitting in our garage for like half a year just gathering dust. (Well, actually, my dad took the motorcycle class last Fall, but he doesn't really ride much.) Yea, I think 250's the wimpiest that they make sport bikes in, but supposedly it's good to learn on something with a piddly engine, I guess? -_-

On my first day out by myself, I was riding around a neighborhood, and took a fall on a slow speed turn. And yea, it hurt, but I think it was the sheer shock of what had happened that kept me lying on the ground like WHOA, what the hell just happened??? I was wearing my leather jacket, so I didn't get scraped up too bad, but it tore a hole in the leather (I guess there IS a pretty big difference between leather for riding and the soft stuff for casual wear. >_<) I went out and bought myself a motorcycle jacket right after that (; my brother's old one was a little too small for me). I DO rather like the feel of wearing a motorcycle jacket though- if ever there was an outfit that deserved soundtrack music when you put it on, the motorcycle get-up would be it, haha.

But yea, seriously- I'm gonna need a LOT more practice before I'm ready for the streets, much less the highway. Right now, any time I go over like 40 mph, I start getting really nervous. I gotta admit, there are moments on the bike where I seriously fear for my life. It's like being 15 and learning how to drive a car again- only this time, there's no seat belt, air bag, or crumple zone. And the bike is a lot less [forgiving] of user error than a car.

A lot of the difficulty I'm having, I think, is cuz I've never driven a manual transmission before, so I'm having to learn all the shifting and clutch control on top of the usual handling/steering stuff. I stall the engine... a LOT. >_< I just feel like there's so much stuff I need to be thinking about all at the same time. And of course, THAT's the problem right there: I shouldn't HAVE to think about it- it should all be as natural as instinct. Well, it'll have to be before I'm ready for the primetime, I suppose. =/ More practice! >:O

Who's the Boss?. And I dunno, I get the feeling that riding a motorcycle will always be one of those things where I might be decently competent, but I'll never be able to do anything real super cool and daring. I'm just too scared of getting hurt. It's like how I am with snowboarding- I can hold my own just getting down a mountain, but jumps and excessive speed scare me. It's like I don't know if it's the snowboard (or motorcycle) in charge, or me. And deep down, I know it can't be like that. I need to make it submit to my will.

I remember when I was learning chain whip back in my kung fu days, and I really just had a very hard time getting it to do what I wanted. Yea, if it ever comes up in your life (e.g., if you ever have to avenge your family's deaths at the hands of ninjas), any flexible weapon (like a whip, or nunchucks, or rope dart) is inherently harder to learn & control than a rigid one (like a sword, spear, or stick). And I don't remember if I actually learned this from a person or just some tacky kung fu B-movie, but it's still true nonetheless: The weapon should be an extension of your body. If you fear the weapon, you'll never truly master it- you'll never be the one in control.

I think that's an overriding theme in my life. Whether it be a motorcycle, a snowboard, a weapon, a horse, or anything ELSE in my life- I'm just too dang SCARED all the time of the possible consequences of failure that I'm subconsciously keeping myself from realizing my true potential. I mean, yea, ok, so I've had some setbacks, and it's put the fear in me, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't get back on the bike, right? I can't just give up because I've been hurt. No one said this life would be easy, but I'm living the wrong character archetype in my own memoir. =/ I need to be better than this.

"Fall seven times, stand up eight." ~Dwyane Wade, Converse commercial (well, Japanese proverb, actually)

Chicane - No Ordinary Morning

"If there was nothing that I could say,
Turned your back and you just walked away

Leaves me numb inside I think of you,
Together is all I knew.

We moved too fast but I had no sign,
I would try to turn the hands of time

I looked to you for a reason why
The loved we had passed me by.

And as the sun would set you would rise,
Fall from the sky into paradise.

Is there no light in your heart for me?
You've closed your eyes, you no longer see.

There were no lies between me and you,
You said nothing of what you knew,

But there was still something in your eyes
Left me helpless and paralyzed.

You could give a million reasons, change the world and change the tides,
Could not give me the secrets of your heart and of your mind
In the darkness that surrounds me now there is no peace of mind.
Your careless words undo me, leave the thought of us behind..."

*I posted this, and realized a few minutes later that I'd already posted the exact same song lyrics years ago. Yea, I like the song that much, apparently.

No Closure. Have you ever read the book Life of Pi? It's about a boy trapped at sea on a lifeboat with a tiger. And eventually, over time, he starts thinking of the tiger as his companion in the struggle for survival, kinda like the Wilson volleyball in Tom Hanks' Cast Away.

Anyways, towards the end of the book, when they finally reach shore, the tiger just hops out of the boat and dashes away into the wilderness, never looking back once. And it bothers the boy for the rest of his life: he wishes the tiger would've just looked back one last time, made eye contact, or SOMEhow acknowledged their time together with some sort of goodbye or something, so he could have closure. But it kills him that the tiger just walked out of his life so easily, never pausing for a goodbye, as if their time together had meant nothing.

The goodbye is crucial. Any kind of ending, whether it be good or bad, is better than nothing. How can you let go if your heart never gets a chance to say goodbye?

Why couldn't the string have just been cut, harshly OR gently, (or been left a promise of being mended) instead of being left so frayed, so helpless?

So I recently got a new laptop and a new phone. Since I've been in the habit of vaguely reviewing these kindsa products when I get new ones, I guess I'll do just that.

Laptop. So the last laptop that I had (a Lenovo) crapped out after less than a year and a half (the CD/DVD drive just stopped working, and the whole thing would overheat and shut itself down without a notebook cooler). Anyways, so one of the summer interns at my company last year had a tablet PC, and I thought it was really neat. So when I had to get myself a new laptop, I was mainly looking at tablets, and wound up with the HP Touchsmart tx2z. This was billed as the first consumer multi-touch tablet PC. I got it from Best Buy, since all told, it was actually cheaper there than from the HP website. One of the down-sides to that though, was that it came pre-configured with the slowest processor available in that line. And I don't know if it's the AMD processor or the fact that it runs 64-bit Windows, but what I DO know is that a year and a half after I bought my last laptop, I thought I'd be upgrading but wound up with one that actually runs slower. >_< Fail!

But yea, in all honesty, I really don't use the tablet features often enough to justify how much extra I paid for a computer of these specs. (Though I must say that the stylus input with Chinese character recognition WAS pretty cool.) Well, I learned my lesson, and I guess I don't ever need to buy a tablet PC again. =/ I mean, I guess I'm not super disappointed by my purchase, but like, did you ever order something out of a catalog as a kid, and spend weeks psyching yourself about how awesome it was gonna be as it shipped, and then it gets to you, and you're like wait, this is IT?? Yea, it was a feeling kinda like that. -_- I'd rate this laptop a 6, maybe 7, in terms of how it satisfied my expectations.

Phone. My family's cell phone contract finally ended in January, and when we renewed, I got the Nokia Xpress Music 5310. It's a slim candybar phone whose main feature is its music playing capability (it has a 3.5 mm jack for headphones, instead of the funky weird one on most phones). I figured I'd try just having a music player phone instead of shelling out for a new iPod after my old one got stolen like a month and a half earlier.

Anyways, I'm not super impressed with the software design & customizability, but in terms of the bare essentials, it gets the job done ok. Seriously, no way to set a silent but vibrating alarm?? And it's kind of a pain to set up playlists or find exactly the song you're looking for if you've got a long library of songs (it lets you expand (I think up to 8Gb?) with a microSD card). Battery life isn't stellar on this thing either- I feel like I'm charging it every day and a half or so, and more often when I've been listening to music a lot. Overall though, it pretty much met my expectations for a new phone; I'd recommend it. But yea, I figure maybe a couple more years, and maybe we'll finally be [not-cheap] enough to get smartphones... maybe, hahah.