musings on what makes people attractive

I watched a Broadway play tonight: History Boys, the 2006 Tony Award winner for Best Play. It was set in a college prep school in England.



Dekan, the boy in the very middle of the picture, was referred to several times as the most attractive boy. His two male history teachers wanted to fondle him (and more). His gay classmate pined for him throughout the show.

Sometimes I watch shows where one character is made out to be super-hyper-attractive. But they're not, and I internally question "That person?"

Not so this time. I felt the full gale of attraction. There were moments when I wanted to leap over the thirteen rows of seats in front of me, using the seat backs to spring onto the stage and embrace him.

But I didn't.

Because I figured he wouldn't like that.

It got me thinking as to what makes people attractive. Dekan was physically good-looking, the best of the bunch, but it was more than that.



He was very confident. For example, making an overture on his history teacher. "I was thinking now that the term is over, you and I could go get a drink." Teacher: "No." Dekan: "Well, drink is really a euphemism. I meant that ... maybe you could [bleep] me off."

But sometimes people are really good-looking and confident, and yet they just get on your nerves. Like Paris Hilton to many people. Or a guy I met last month in a San Francisco party.

Maybe those people aren't truly confident. Or maybe there are some detractors that overpower the attractiveness of the confidence.

I was standing in the subway station while thinking these thoughts. Suddenly I heard my name called, and after whipping my head around two or three times, I saw Andrew, a fellow Googler. He revealed he'd gone to the same play, and I posed this question to him.

He made the obligatory disclaimers about not being able to tell if a guy is attractive (note to all men: It is OKAY to admit another guy is attractive! You will not become labelled as gay. Get over it already!)

"It's the confidence," Andrew said.

Okay. So what makes some people confident, and not others? I recalled to a time four years ago when I was managing a particularly nervous high school intern at Microsoft. My manager Jason gave me this advice for the intern, "Confidence can't be granted. It comes from setting challenges and then surmounting them."

That's not entirely accurate though. Truly confident people are confident at all times, even in areas they have no experience in. I recall going to an upscale restaurant with my Microsoft team once. Rob, the test lead, was obviously unaccustomed to the setting, but he ate the carpaccio and raw tuna and bantered with us with the greatest of comfort.

Maybe confidence is when no one can really make you feel bad about yourself. No words will bring you down. You could receive a thousand insults, and you wouldn't bat an eye. You could get fired, and you'd just calmly send out your resume.

What do you think?

Gloria ... Steinem... Mind exploding.

Gloria Steinem is giving a talk right now at Google. I am watching it over video conference from New York. I wish so badly that I could be in Mountain View to see her in person!



She is 73. She is articulate and positive. She is so beautiful. She defies age.

She just described a female Senator, the first one to be pregnant during her term, who said on the Senate floor, "I have a brain and a womb, and I am going to use both."

I have been a fan of Gloria Steinem since I was 13, when my high school English teacher Ms. Cartwright assigned Steinem's writing and Feminine Mystique.

In class, Ms. Cartwright showed us a picture of Gloria Steinem at 50. Steinem walked into her 50th birthday party, and said, "This is what 50 looks like." We passed around the photo in class, and my teacher said, "Most of us would like to look this good at 18." It was true.

Hearing her speak is blowing my mind.

NYC, the little differences, part 1

I'm working from Google's New York office for the next week. Change of scenery. So far it's been good: the plane trip over was super-productive.



In NYC for 48 hours, and I've already noticed a few "little differences":

1. New York is a 24-hour city. I cabbed from JFK airport at 3:00am, resigned to going to bed hungry. Lo and behold, pizza parlors were still open on every other street.

The same time on the following night, I walked past a hat store which was open. A HAT store. Just in case you're overcome with a late-night urge to accessorize your head, this shop is ready to serve.



This is what New York looks like at 3:30am. Note the traffic and crowds standing in the street:



Compare to what Mountain View looks like at 3:30am:




Heck, compare to what Mountain View looks like at 3:30 IN THE AFTERNOON on most days:



...

2. New York City has never heard of toilet seat covers. For those readers who hail from the Big Apple and hence do not know what I'm talking about, they're paper coverings you wrap on the toilet seat to avoid getting germs:





The only place I've seen toilet seat covers is the marble-hugged restroom in the Westin lobby:



The rest of New York? Apparently pro-germs.

Saturday night, New York style

Love this top. It helps that Mary (the girl sporting it) is tall with the body of a model. She's a New Yorker now, but used to live in Mountain View, on Rengstorff and Middlefield.



...

Me with my Googler friend Leslie, who broke into a huge smile any time she talked about her boyfriend-recently-turned-fiance. Awww.



...

Two sweet Mormon girls I met on Saturday night. They took me to the nightclub Aer, which had the best DJ I've ever experienced.



...

Me with the party hostess.

Now, judging from comments on prior posts, some of you can't seem to tell blondes apart. So before you bombard me about how beautiful Sara is and how much you adore her and how her pictures are the meaning of your existence, I have this to say:

Yes, Sara is truly gorgeous. No doubt about it. However, the picture below is not Sara! It's my friend Eva. If you're going to be obsessed, get it right.

a difficult morning

Yesterday Cisco held an all-company meeting at Amphitheatre down the street from Google. Shoreline, the road many Googlers take to work, was completely backed up.

My 6-minute commute turned into 40 minutes. At one point, I realized that the the driver of the car stuck next to me was Kan, the Google Desktop PM. We rolled down our windows and had a nice chat.

I got into work, and found an amusing email thread "Shoreline? WTF?!".

The next email thread is a warning by a Googler that they spotted a snake near their building.

Within 10 minutes, the servers grind to a halt. My email is down. There's some kind of network outage.

My coworkers and I lamented. It takes an hour to drive to work, the network is down, and there are SNAKES on campus! And it's not even noon!

they sure like to cut it close

Sunday. Driving to San Francisco with Watt, who is an ACM International Programming Contest finalist, and Darryl, who is a highly ranked TopCoder contestant.

Me: Why don't the ACM competitors also do Topcoder?

Watt: They're very different. In TopCoder, you don't know whether your submissions are correct until after the contest is over.

Me: Wow, that really teaches careful programming! We should make TopCoder a required course in college.

Tom: It doesn't teach good design. In fact, it encourages obfuscation, since competitors are scanning your code for bugs.

Me: Good point.

Tom: When is the TopCoder collegiate qualifying round anyway?

Darryl: Today.

Me: What? But you're out with us right now.

Darryl: It was at 10 a.m. I wrote it in 20 minutes and then came out to meet you.

Me: [flashing back to how I told Darryl that we'd pick him at 10:30am, plus or minus 10 minutes] But ... the round is 75 minutes. And then there's the challenge round. Why didn't you just ask me to pick you up last, after I picked up everyone else?

Darryl: Eh, I wrote the first two questions in 20 minutes. It'll be enough.

Me: Wow, that's confidence.

---

A few minutes later:

Me: One of my friends, Matthew, is a judge for the ACM World Finals every year. Last year, he created one of the questions. Midway through the competition, teams started to submit answers, and the answers ran through his tester app. Then he realized there was an off-by-one bug in his tester app. If any team submitted the maximum input size, his tester app would crash.

Darryl: What did he do?

Me: While the teams madly solved the programming questions, he madly debugged his tester app.

Watt: Ha.

Me: On one side, you have a student typing furiously on the keyboard, racing against the clock. On the other side of the wall divider, a judge is doing the same thing.

if your fiance turns out to be a lemon, make lemonade

A woman who learned six weeks before her wedding that her fiance was cheating on her is turning her would-be reception into a charity benefit.

She and her mother canceled the band, photographer and florist, but learned they would not be reimbursed for the reception and block of rooms they had reserved. So they turned the reception into a benefit for the Vermont Children's Aid Society and CARE USA, an international relief organization that aims to combat poverty by empowering women.

Full article.

Awesome, awesome. If I am ever in this situation (God forbid), I now know what I will do.

i want a tattoo that says "goatse.cx forever"

During dinner at Google.

Tom: In the Mac operating system, you can change the image that's displayed during a kernel panic. There was an engineer at another company who got tired of his teammates introducing kernel panic bugs. So he changed the image to goatse.cx. You'd be debugging, and a kernel panic would happen and then goatse.cx would fill your screen!

Me: Hee hee!

Tom: The number of kernel panic bugs checked into the codebase went down dramatically after that day.

Me: I bet.

Tom: Can you imagine that happening while you're doing a demo for customers?

Me: Oh my God, during Press Day! Or during the annual stockholder's meeting.

Tom: I wonder how fast your stock price would fall.

Me: You'd be doing your demo, then suddenly kernel panic and goatse.cx! You'd lament, "There's nothing that could be worse than this!" Then you'd switch to a screen showing your stock price plummeting through the floor.

Tom: The plummet would be so fast that you'd underflow and then kernel panic again.

Me: But compared to the picture of the stock price, you'd look at goatse.cx and breathe a big sigh of relief. Whew! Much better.

goatse.cx code review

zeitgeist, drinking beer in the patio. Qing and Watt had never heard of goatse.cx [wikipedia entry].

Alipé: "It's an orifice."

Qing and Watt: [puzzled]

Joby: "In the future, if I have to send you a really big code review, I'm going to mark it as a goatse.cx code review."

Alipé: "Put 3***E at the top."

Me: "What's that?"

Alipé: "ASCII art for goatse.cx."

Me: "Oh my God!"

Alipé: "If there's rich text editing, I'll make the asterisks red."

when men cry

I think it's sweet when a man cries. Not as in depressed sobbing:



but when a confident man sheds tears, I find it really attractive. For example, imagine that Ryan Phillippe is crying in this picture:



That's hot.

...

Last month, I was discussing this with David A. during happy hour:

Me: It's so endearing when guys cry.

David: You wouldn't say that if you saw it in real life.

Me: I've seen all of my exes cry. Recently, X cried twice during the week that we dated.

David: What?

Me: Yeah, once because he felt guilty, and the other time after I let him read my novel-in-progress.

David: [scoffing noises]

Me: What? I think it's sweet!

David: Crying is not sweet.

Me: Sure it is.

David: If I were you, and the guy cried, here is what I would say: 'Crying is pathetic. YOU are pathetic! Get out of my face.'

...

Well, gentle reader,

What do you think when a man cries?

That's sweet!
That's pathetic!

photos of a lovely night

Getting ready to go out to a birthday party at Mr. Smith's club / bar.

Sara in a white sweater dress. There are no words. It couldn't even be captured on film. This is a pale shadow of what it looked like in real life:



Black and white:



At the club, a MIT graduate (friend of a friend) danced near us, then ducked down. We thought he was picking up something, but instead he darted over and fondled Sara's leg. What is MIT teaching these days??



Happy birthday John.



We ended the night at Pizza Orgasmica in the Castro. A long line of cute gay boys. The place was so popular that it had a bouncer. Yes, THE PIZZA PARLOR HAD A BOUNCER. Only in San Fran.

Here is a pic of said bouncer:

fuck buddies: coming soon to a country near you

Saturday I bid farewell to my young basketball friend Lu (or as Alipé called him, "Fuck Buddy" boy). (Note to readers too lazy to click the link: Don't interpret this the wrong way! He was not MY fuck buddy, just a figurehead for the idea.)

Lu is flying back to Beijing, to the land of slim beautiful Chinese women to whom he can now spread the fuck buddy concept.

(Yes, gentle readers, I know some of you will be furious over my glee at evangelizing immorality to a nation. I'm ready for the 50 angry comments. BRING IT.)

...

As a goodbye lunch, Lu came out to dim sum with me and my brother. The two of them:



Outside the restaurant, me with Lu:



Lu was so kind to me during our league's last basketball game. It was a playoff game three weeks ago, and our opponent was a team that defeated us two weeks prior. They had eight players, and we only had six. So we were able to do fewer substitutions.

When the score was at 11-11, my team swapped me back in. I grudgingly agreed, and responsibility lay heavy on me to not do stupid things.

As I was running onto the court, Lu said something to me from the sidelines. It was so kind, and it was in Mandarin, and I probably will never again hear the like, because Chinese-speaking guys are not that complimentary. He said, "加油 gorgeous."

加油 has no real English translation but roughly means "go for it".

I was really touched.

Then we lost the basketball game.

but you said...

Near the end of Saturady night, an Irish-looking man sat down next to me in the booth. After exchanging introductions...

Me: How do you know the birthday boy?

Him: We were in the same frat at MIT.

Me: Oh cool. What do you do now?

Him: I handle recruiting for BeeYay (* name changed).

Me: I used to work in that field. [some details of my previous work]

Him: You should leave Google and come work for us.

Me: Ha, no way.

Him: Why not?

Me: [changing subject] So, it must be hard to recruit for your company.

Him: Why do you say that?

Me: Your company has an awful reputation for work-life balance.

Him: How do you know?

Me: Come on, I read that forum post from beeyay_spouse.

Him: You saw that?

Me: Along with everyone else in our industry.

Him: Oh...

Me: That's why I say it must suck to be a recruiter there.

Him: I'm not a recruiter.

Me: What?

Him: I'm the VP of HR.

Me: !

pwned

My brother Tom works as an intern at Apple. He turned down Google in order to do this.

At a Cole Valley coffeeshop:

Me: Tom, your Powerbook is so slow!

Tom: It is?

Me: Look. [types into blogger.com edit box. Letters appear after three or four seconds.]

Tom: That lag is from Blogger. [leans over keyboard, opens another window and types into it. Letters appear immediately.]

Me: Oh, you're right.

Tom: Don't blame my company. Blame your own!

and he's cute too

While searching for images for my last post, I came across an article on Thresh with the following two great quotes:

"While growing up, Thresh's parents worried that this kid is spending too much time on video games.  But ever since he drove the Ferrari home from XX tournament, now what that causes him headaches is his parents asking, 'Did you practice gaming today?'"

"Thresh with his girlfriend, Miss Chinatown:"

Thresh,  我甘拜下风.  ("I willingly bow down to your superiority.")
  

step aside, Bobby Fischer

Tom: Thresh came to speak at Stanford two months ago.

Me: Oh yeah?  I hear that in addition to being Quake champion of the world, he's a pretty cool guy.



Tom: Have you ever watched a video of him playing?  He's so good.  He can anticipate four moves ahead.  He knows if he shoots a rocket at this angle, the opponent will have to duck into the next room.  Then if he chases them, they'll have to strafe to a particular spot ... By the fourth move, they're backed into a place where there's no way for them to avoid getting killed by him.



Me: Cool.  I wonder if he won enough money from tournaments in order to do nothing but play Quake for the rest of his life.

Tom: I'm sure he could.  I bet someone would be willing to pay money to support him.

Me: A true patron of the arts.

芙蓉姐姐

When I visited Shanghai last October, China was all abuzz about an Internet phenomenon named "芙蓉姐姐" (Sister Lotus). Recently I came across some pics of her, which I'll share with you, gentle readers.

Sister Lotus first attracted attention when she posted to the BBS'es of Tsinghua and Beijing University (the top two universities in the nation). She wrote the story of how she failed to get into those universities. Then she posted pictures of herself in sexy poses, and wrote lines such as:

"I have the face of an angel and the body of a devil."

"To men, I am the sweetest flower. They love to drink my nectar."

"My sexy appearance and ice-and-jade pure quality bring me a lot of attention wherever I go. I'm always the centre of everything. People never tire of looking at my face, and my physique gives men nose-bleeds."

Is she the sweetest flower? You judge:







She spread like wildfire across China. My theory is that it's because the nation has 4000 years of history of being humble and downplaying oneself. In the US, if you tell your friend, "Hey, you're gorgeous!", she'll say, "Wow, thank you! I'm so flattered!"

In China, if you say that, your friend will say, "Me? No, I can't be. My nose is too flat, and I have fat here [pulling at tiny fold of skin at hip]."

Finally someone comes along who blows all that humility out of the water. After her outlandish claims, you can imagine the mockery that ensued. Unperturbed, she continued right along, and is now getting book deals and commercial endorsements and a wikipedia entry.

I think she frees the Chinese people to be proud just a little. Because if she's making the boasts that she does, then maybe it's not so much of a sin if occasionally you allow yourself to accept one little compliment.

At least this is my understanding. Recall that I have a screwed-up impression formed from my parents' snapshot of China 20 years ago, and reading martial-arts novels growing up.

I leave you with this delight:



Yes, what you see there is the most popular blogger of my homeland.

dissed and dismissed

Today a friend used the phrase "the 'Max's wedding' situation". Here's the story, so that we can all start using the phrase.

A couple months ago, in a work meeting with just Max and Yonatan.

Me: Two minutes left. Any last things we should discuss?

Yonatan: No, I'm done. By the way, Max, I got your wedding invitation in the mail. The RSVP is on its way to you. [turns to me expectantly]

Me: Don't look at me. I wasn't invited.

Yonatan: [quick alarmed glance at Max] Oh! Oh... Oh, this is awkward.

Max: [silence]

Me: Well, screw you guys. I was invited to Andrew K's wedding, and neither of you were.

Max: Who's Andrew K?

Me: Engineer on Google Earth.

Max: I don't even know who that is.

...

Later that afternoon.

Max: I think we should talk to group XYZ again, to see if we want to collaborate with them. I feel bad that the first time we talked to them, I didn't have enough context to evaluate their proposal.

Me: Sure, we can call them again, but there's no need to feel bad about that.

Max: Well...

Me: If you're going to feel bad about anything, it should be about the fact that you didn't invite me to your wedding.

Yonatan: [covers eyes with hand, shaking silently with laughter]

jarring

In Seattle six years ago, I dated a guy for a month. It didn't work out, but we stayed friends. Later he moved to Singapore and starred in their reality TV show equivalent of "The Bachelorette".

Tonight I chanced upon a new blog, one of the 100 most frequently-visited blogs on the web. A recent entry describes how the author went to a super-fab party in Singapore, and shows pictures of herself with a bunch of models and celebrities.

One of the pics is her with my friend / ex-date.



Life is weird.

power

Over dinner at Google tonight, Vanessa and I caught up on the current state of our old friends from Caltech.

W opened up a bar in a rural town in China.
X works at a bookstore in Seattle.
Y is living in Los Angeles and relaxing (i.e. not working).
Z is living in South America and relaxing (i.e. not working).

It is surprising how many of our classmates turned their back on the fields they studied at Caltech. Imagine it: you work passionately throughout your teen years, culminating in four years of rigorous study at Caltech. You put in long hours to get a degree from one of the highest ranked science and engineering universities.

Then you turn your back on it, to pursue a life that takes no advantage of those talents.

As far as I can tell, all these people are very happy.

Three years ago, after Wesley left his software startup, I invited him to consider working for Google. He decided no, and instead moved to China and turned an old building into a bar.

When we exchanged email last year, he said something to the effect of, "Occasionally I have 1% regret over the financial impact of that decision. But I wouldn't trade my current feeling of freedom for any amount of money."

...

It reminds me of a conversation with Cliff a couple years ago, about the dynamics in relationships.

I said, "The person who cares less has more power."

Cliff said, "No, the person who needs less has more power."

too soon has thy vigor faded

Today the Bike Doctor came on-site to repair bikes for Googlers. I wheeled my mountain bike across the parking lot to the large white van bearing the "Bike Doctor" emblem.

Microsoft bought this bicycle for me when I interned there, nine years ago. It cost three hundred fifty dollars new, and although it's been almost a decade, in my eyes it still holds the bloom of youth.

Bike Doctor: You'll need a new seat ... new brake line .. The shifters are broken. Brake pads are almost gone. Chain is pretty bad. All in all, it's going to come out to 150 dollars. You might as well spend 250 and get a new bike.

Me: How much would you say my bike is worth right now?

Bike Doctor: Zero to thirty dollars.

Me: Zero? [to Piaw, walking by] Piaw, my bike is worth zero to thirty dollars.

Piaw: [looks bike over] [chirpily] That's about right.

...

Oh bike, how rough are the ravages of time!

Clarifying a few misunderstandings.

Recently a few erroneous perceptions have come to my attention.

1. Some people think that I don't want to date Asian guys, just because I wrote a post entitled "Why I Don't Date Asian Men".
   
   As I stated in the post, I would love to date a Chinese guy. But it has to be a sweet Chinese guy, and therein lies the rub.
   
   (Incidentally, that post was catalyzed by one particular Asian guy. Who I then dated. Word.)
   
   
2. My ab fetish does not require six-pack abs. The only request is flatness.
   
   This is great:
   
   
   This is too much:
   
   
   (Incidentally, I was amused that a Google image search for "male abs" brought up my blog in the second page. Word.)
   
   
3. My friends said this better than I could've today:
   
   David: Niniane, your dating tagline should be "Hot guys only".
   
   Nina: [to David] But then guys will think she's superficial.
   
   David: No, no, I've read her blog post about this. There are other important factors, besides the hotness.
   
   Nina: Hm.
   
   David: Niniane, your dating tagline should be "HOTNESS: Necessary but not sufficient".
   

maybe the guy meant it ... or maybe guys are jerks

Over white wine. Eating French bread with goat cheese and pâté, with Ken and a French exchange graduate-student Annie:

Ken: "My friend Mary is dating that extremely tall French guy from Gail's party."

Me: "Oh, the guy that drove her home that night? Cool."

Ken: "Are French guys really forward? After the second date, he told her that she's the One, and that he wants to spend his life with her. I told her that it's a total line."

Me: "Why?? Maybe he means it!"

Ken: "After the second date?"

Me: "That's pretty fast, but there's still a chance he means it!"

Ken: "I guess I'm just protective of my friends."

Me: "But if you destroy her trust in people, then she'll become a defensive person and that's also bad!"

Annie: "It depends on how he said it."

Me: "Right. Was he trying to get sex out of her?"

Annie: "Yeah, like if he says, 'You are the woman for my life. I've been searching for you all my days. Do you want to have sex?"

Ken: [smiling] "Oh, that doesn't work? Damn it!"

Me: "You need to wait at least five minutes in between the sweet-talk and the sex question."

Ken: "One-one thousand. Two-one thousand..."

end-of-August Sat night in pics

With the statuesquely beautiful Sara:


Warm wishes to the birthday boy:


With Christina and her tattoo:


Pool party at an awesome house with five levels. The kitchen:


Fun Australian girl. Great dress:


Gay love:


Indoor pool, hot tub, and steam room on the first level of the house. I'm taking this pic from the stairs on the second level.


Christina: "We're engineers! This pool scene is Silicon Valley trying to be LA."

cute little exchanges

Me: As you requested, I wrote a blog post about you.

Lu: I am excited and nervous... God bless me.

---

Me: The American cafe that opened across the street in building 44 is SO GOOD. Corn bisque, handmade ice cream, ... I'm worried I'm going to get fat.

Alipé: Well Niniane, if you'd like, I can give you daily feedback.

---

At dinner.

Alipé: I noticed girls you're dating don't like it if you tell them that they've gotten fatter.

Me: You don't say.

Alipé: Yeah, they get all miffed. Then I say, "What, would you rather I just silently resented you?"

Me: [laughing]

Yonatan: You could say it in a more lighthearted manner.

Alipé: There's always a grain of truth to jokes though.

Joby: Yeah. You can't really say, "Hey, you're REALLY FAT. Oh ha ha! Just kidding!"

Star Trek inspirational posters.

My faves:





Alas. I've never seen the famed "City on the Edge of Forever", and it's not on YouTube or Google Video.





and the best one, funny because it's true:



The Full Deal.

Goodbye Pluto. Goodbye Earth.

So Pluto is no longer a planet. Fine.

But apparently, the redefinition may hit a little closer to home.

Stern sees problems ahead for the IAU definition.

Under the current wording, Earth does not qualify as a planet because it has not "cleared the neighborhood around its orbit," he said. Objects called near-Earth asteroids orbit the sun at roughly the same from our home star as Earth.

Intern sass, remembered.

Watt reminded me recently of the time that he and Alipé faced off against Henry and me at basketball. Watt sustained a toenail injury during the game, and we went to a nearby Google building to treat it.

We picked up bandages, and then Henry and I went into the microkitchen. When we came back into the corridor, Alipé and Watt were nowhere in sight.

Henry: They must have gone into the bathroom.

Me: Yeah. [pause] [goofily] Which one do you think they went into?

Henry: The women's bathroom. Judging from their performance at basketball.

Me: [laughing] Ha ha! [suddenly] Wait, that's an insult to all women too.

Randall trying to provoke

Dinner with my ex-roommate Yolanda, her boyfriend Randall, and my brother Tom. Randall cooked stewed beef, mashed potatoes (from raw potatoes!), and gravy.

Sipping champagne after dinner.

Randall: Did you two fight growing up? You seem to get along really well.

Tom: Not really. But my sister did give me a fear of heights.

Me: [looking down sheepishly]

Randall: How did that happen?

Tom: I was 3, and my family went to Carlsbad Caverns. My sister pretended she was going to throw me over the railing into the cavern.

Randall: Niniane!

Me: [chagrined] Yeah, it happened.

Randall: So which one of you did better in school?

Me: Tom.

Tom: [simultaneously] Niniane.

Me: He has the higher GPA.

Tom: Stanford has grade inflation though.

Randall: Which one of you does your Mom love more?

Tom: Definitely Niniane.

Me: Yeah, it's me. I think my dad loves Tom more, but his delta is less than my mom's delta.

Randall: Your mom loves you more, even after your recent argument?

Me: Oh! Good point.

Tom: Yeah, you've probably gone down in her mind. It's time for the rise of Tom!

don't fight the obsession

I'm in the middle of two writing books: On Writing by Stephen King, and The Art of Writing by John Gardiner.

They both make the point that in order to write well, you must read a lot. Tonight I drew up a list of 30 books I want to read. As a child, I went through one 300-page novel every 1-2 days, but now I am 50 times slower.

Growing up, my mother repeated daily to me that reading novels is a waste of time. To parents out there, please don't stop your kids from obsessive reading! You may be suppressing their deep love for literature and ingraining guilt into them over a passion that they cannot control! Take the time you would've spent forcing them to play the piano / violin / cello and let them read instead.

David A. makeover

David A was visiting Cali last month, and his wife Nina asked me to take him shopping and buy him a couple of new outfits.

Before:


After #1 (dressy):


After #2 (casual hip):


I hope you like it, Nina.

ah, America

There is a 22-year-old Chinese engineer Lu on my basketball team. He is going to college in China (清华）, and here in California for an internship. He wants to learn more about the culture in the States, and I like hearing about how things are in China, so sometimes we talk about the differences.



One day, Lu asked me how people date in America. I gave him a rundown of the typical stages, from meeting to exchanging contact info to dates to relationship.

Me: ... So at some point after you've gone on some dates, you have a talk about whether you're exclusive.

Lu: Oh, in China, it is assumed that if you go out two or three times by yourselves, then you implicitly agree to be exclusive.

Me: Yeah, in the US you usually have to state it explicitly.

Lu: Is that also when you say "I love you" to each other?

Me: No!!!!!! That usually happens much later. Often months later.

Lu: Oh. In China it happens early on. Actually, we say "I love you" in English quickly, but "我爱你” ("I love you" in Chinese) later.

Me: Huh.

Lu: American dating is so much fun! One needn't have too much pressure hanging out and making out. In China the fifth time you date a girl, you'll probably have to ask her to be your girlfriend.

Me: In the US you can just have fuck buddies. If you're into that.

Lu: What is that?

Me: From urbandictionary,

7. a special friend that you fuck.
Example: "would you like to be my fuck buddy?"

Lu: I see.

[ ... much later in the conversation ... ]

Lu: btw in USA is it polite to ask a girl you meet to be your fuck buddy, according to the example sentence in urban dictionary?