choices

I'm buying a new bed frame. Overstock has worked well for me, so I'm considering these frames from their site:

A.


B.


C.


I'm told that my existing home decor scheme is to locally maximize each piece of furniture. i.e. I have the prettiest chandelier, the prettiest dining room table, the prettiest clock, but together they are a mishmash. The whole is less than the sum of the parts.

To combat this, I have to figure out what goes with my dresser.



and jewelry chest:



and the room itself (sky-blue walls and light pine hardwood floors).

Gratitude experiment, part 1.

I decided to do a little experiment, wherein I write a post to people throughout my life that I'm grateful to, whom I never got to thank. We'll see if turns out to be boring.

The first person I'm grateful to is a boy from Salt Lake City, who was my second-grade classmate. It was a year after my family moved to the US, and I was still learning English. This proved aggravating on a daily basis. I didn't know the right words to protest when another student stole my dessert at lunch, I failed an assignment because I couldn't understand the instructions, etc.

One day the teacher announced that we were going to play the game of telephone. The other American students got excited and moved to sit in a big circle on the carpet. I convinced one of them to slowly explain the rules to me. Needless to say, when I learned that the goal is to comprehend a English sentence and repeat it back to the next person, I became filled with apprehension.

I sat a third of the way down the circle, and watched as the teacher whispered for several seconds into the first student's ear. Her face lit up, and she chuckled as she repeated it to the next student. The sentence moved rapidly around the circle, and within a couple minutes, the girl to my right was whispering a long string of syllables into my ear.

To my horror, I could not decipher any meaning out of what she said.

I made her repeat it.

I still didn't understand it. At my insistence, she repeated it two more times, with growing exasperation. Finally, I turned with dread to the boy to my left, and regurgitated the first few syllables which I had blindly memorized.

They were "super california."

The boy to my left heard my accented syllables, and immediately said, "Don't worry. I know what it is." He was so reassuring.

He turned to the kid to his left, and by the muffled whispering, I knew that somehow he actually got the phrase out of what I said. And the phrase kept going around the circle.

Years later, I watched "Mary Poppins" for the first time, and realized that the teacher -- in her infinite wisdom -- had chosen the phrase "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious".

I still remember the exact expression and tone of voice when that boy said, "I know what it is." He was really kind. Thank you, boy of unknown name from Salt Lake City.

ambivalent

Tonight I saw "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" and it was much funnier than expected.


Almost all the funny lines were from Aldous Snow. Like this one, where he's wearing a Hawaiian shirt that's a gift from his girlfriend. He hates the shirt.

Aldous Snow: [after spilling red wine on his shirt] Oh God, take my eyes, but not the shirt!

Or responding to one of his fans:

Matthew: I have a question for you real quick. What did you think of my demo? Did you get it?

Aldous Snow: I was gonna listen to that, but then, um, I just carried on living my life.

Or his description of his vacation with his girlfriend:

Aldous Snow: I don't know how you put up with her. It's like Hitler. Maybe that's going too far. No, it's not -- it's like a holiday with Hitler.

I wish more people were this hilarious in real-life. However, the reason the character is so funny is largely due to his cruelty. It wouldn't be good for more people to go around dashing youngsters' dreams and mocking the fashion tastes of their loved ones.

But it's so funny!

Conflicted.

i would've asked it 500 questions already

Recently I advised a friend not to fret about her relationship going long-distance.

I advised a different friend to dump his unsupportive girlfriend.

I advised a third friend to calm down about his youtube account suspension, and to resume eating and sleeping while he's waiting for his appeal.

Then I got to thinking, how do these people know whether to take my advice? Maybe I give bad advice but I make it sound convincing. I recall a demonstration of this ten years ago:

Me: "Do you want to go eat fondue sometime?"

Iondra : "Like where?"

Me: "There are a couple restaurants that serve it."

Iondra: "What exactly do they serve?"

Me: "Usually there's a cheese fondue, and an oil fondue, and then a chocolate fondue."

Iondra : "Hm. All right, I tried to figure it out from context, but now I have to ask: What is fondue??"

Me: "It's a pot with liquid in it, like a hot pot. You dip solid food into it, and it gets coated with the liquid. So you would dip bread into the cheese, fruit into the chocolate, etc."

Iondra: "I see. [in very authoritative voice] I'm sure the cheese is fine, but the oil fondue sounds bad."

Me: "I haven't tried it. I guess you could be right. It -- Wait a second! Just a minute ago, you didn't even know what fondue was! Why should I listen to you at all?"

Anyhow, I think someone should build a product / social network app / Web 2.0 site / Web 3.0 site to fix this. Every time you need advice, you'll post your quandry onto the site with multiple choice answers. Like:

"Should I date the sister of my ex from five years ago? YES vs. NO."

"What type of phone should I buy? BLACKBERRY vs. IPHONE."

"My husband drunkenly groped my sister. DTMFA vs. FORGIVE HIM."

The service will poll all of your friends, who will vote.

After some time elapses, you go back and use hindsight to select what the correct choice was. Then each of the voters will get a boost or drop in their Advice Rating, based on what they selected.

The site takes the ratings into account when giving you a Final Answer to your question. Ergo, when it tells you to DTMFA, you know it was biased toward your wise friends, and discounted from your foolish friends.

Come to think of it, a number of prediction market applications can likely be adopted for this purpose.

if you forgot too, write a comment so that I feel even better

Me: "I feel like I'm not being a good enough daughter, because I'm not spending enough time with my mom."

Cindy: "You're letting her stay at your house."

Me: "Yeah, but that's not enough. Anyway, what did you do for Mother's Day?"

Cindy: "I actually forgot to call my mom."

Me: "What? You didn't call your mom at all?"

Cindy: "Not until the next day. She even sent me an sms, but I was busy and by the time I thought of it, it was 2am her time."

Me: "Oh my God. Well, at least I called my mom yesterday and ate dinner with her."

Cindy: [making a face like :-| and nodding] "I was pretty bad."

Me: "You totally are! I'm a better daughter than you, at least! This is great!"

Cindy: [nodding abashedly]

Me: "I knew you could make me feel better. Thank you! I'm so glad we talked."

Cindy: "You're welcome."

I like fake inspirational posters

Wenarto's friend made these mock inspirational posters. Alas, you won't find them as funny as I do, unless you know Wenarto.


This photo was actually taken by my brother Tom, at Wenarto's request. It was New Year's in Paris. All the stores were closed but Wenarto had to go to the bathroom.


Wenarto owns wigs, costumes, and backdrops for making youtube videos. They usually involve him singing opera.

sad letter

From Dan Savage's article this week. This letter is so sad:

I grew up in a small town, in a devout Catholic home, and I had no clue there was more than one kind of sexuality. I had thoughts and feelings I didn't know what to do with, but I don't think I'd ever heard the word "gay," much less knew what it meant.

I'd had sex with girls, but I didn't have my first experience with another guy until I was 18. I was at an ex-girlfriend's party, and it wasn't pretty; everyone was bombed or high. Except for this older guy: late-20s, maybe 30, somebody's brother. I knew he was looking at me in a way that men weren't supposed to look at other men. We got talking, realized we both hated the party, and agreed to go for a walk in what by then had to be the wee hours. We were in a big deserted park, grass, bushes, streetlights, when he turned to me and I thought, "He's going to kiss me and I'm going to throw up." He did; I didn't.

I was so awkward. I had no idea how to do the things my feelings were prompting me to do. I knew I wanted to top him, but didn't know that word or how exactly to get there. He was so patient and gentle and understanding. This is not a story of a teenage kid being preyed on. I took the lead; he guided. He never pushed anything. He helped introduce me to myself.

He lived halfway down the East Coast, but he kept in regular touch with calls and long affectionate letters, checking in on me, listening to me, reassuring me that whatever I felt was okay.

Not everyone felt that way. This was almost 40 years ago. When I got comfortable enough to tell my parents I thought I was gay, they had me committed to a mental hospital. That's another story, and not a very nice one. I was there till I was 21 and could legally insist on being released. Shock treatments, megadoses of Thorazine. I don't know why I didn't go truly nuts. I think a big part of it was the memory of that kindness and that closeness, and the rightness of it, for me. I lost a lot during those years locked up. I lost track of that wonderful guy who'd been just what I needed when nobody else understood.

I never had a chance to thank him, so I'd like to do that now, and maybe imagine he's reading this and remembering too.

Anonymous

shall I make a logical informed decision... or just go with pasta

I'm thinking of buying the Rosetta Stone level 1 software for Italian.


Alipé showed me the version for Mandarin, and it looks fun. One task asked him to match a photo to the sentence "This flower is big." Choice A was a tiny clover under a magnifying glass. Choice B was a little girl holding the stem of a two-foot-tall super-daisy. The girl was cute. The flower was cute. Good job, Rosetta Stone.

Anyhow, my reason for learning Italian is to visit Venice for a couple weeks this winter. That desire arose after I, along with every other woman in the United States, read the book Eat, Pray, Love. The "Eat" portion takes place in Italy. It was frivolous reading about the author spending her days eating pasta. Yet now I'm consumed with a desire to learn Italian. Good job, book.

However, I think this is a poor reason for choosing a new language to learn. It would be wiser to use factors like influence in world affairs and socio-literary culture, in which case Italian is not in the top ten.

Or I can learn from Richard Feynman's error, and base my decision on ridiculous reasons:

And since I didn't know yet where I was going to end up in South America, I decided to take Spanish, because the great majority of the countries there speak Spanish.

So when it was time to register for the class, we were standing outside, ready to go into the classroom, when this pneumatic blonde came along. You know how once in a while you get this feeling, WOW? She looked terrific. I said to myself, "Maybe she's going to be in the Spanish class - that'll be great!" But no, she walked into the Portuguese class. So I figured, What the hell - I might as well learn Portuguese.

I started walking right after her when this Anglo -Saxon attitude that I have said, "No, that's not a good reason to decide which language to speak." So I went back and signed up for the Spanish class, to my utter regret.

Some time later I was at a Physics Society meeting in New York, and I found myself sitting next to Jaime Tiomno, from Brazil, and he asked, "What are you going to do next summer?"

"I'm thinking of visiting South America."

"Oh! Why don't you come to Brazil? I'll get a position for you at the Center for Physical Research."

So now I had to convert all that Spanish into Portuguese!

statements that didn't work

Tonight at dinner, Dan dissected the Myers-Brigg scale, in particular the introvert vs. extrovert label. He gave the classic definition of how introverts recharge their batteries through time alone, a concept he strongly identifies with.

Me: I'm starting to feel like our conversations are just combinations of the same topics, repeated.

Dan: Yeah, we need to determine the eigenvectors of our conversation. Then we can never talk again. I can recharge my battery forever!

Me: That's not good, Dan. Batteries that are fully charged for too long will lose their capacity.

Dan: [look of contempt]

---

At lunch with Dan some time ago, at Google Cafe 150.

Me: Speaking of Asian fetishes, here comes Ozzir.

Ozzir: [walking over to our table] Hey.

Me: Dan, this is my friend Ozzir from YouTube. Ozzir, Dan.

Dan: [to Ozzir] So you're being used as an example of a white guy with an Asian fetish.

Ozzir: 'Fetish' sounds so strong. I like to call it an Asian 'preference'.

Dan: But you can't be that bad. I mean, you may have an Asian fetish, but at least you didn't move to China.

Ozzir: I moved to Japan. I'm just visiting for this week.

Tom's 21st

Tom turned 21 last Wednesday. It was also the day that my relative was discharged from the hospital, so we had a double-celebration at home.


Chinese takeout at my house, and beer.


Chocolate marble cake.

---

On Sunday, I took Tom to afternoon tea as another birthday celebration. You might think that I forced this upon him (akin to if he took me to a Counterstrike competition for my birthday), but he actually enjoyed it.



In fact, Tom picked the teahouse. He chose this one in Fremont, because they carry tea hats which the patrons can wear:





I daresay we matched the hats to our outfits reasonably well.

vera-ly it is

While running errands with Tom, I bought a bottle of aloe vera for Tristan's sunburned ankles. Later the three of us ate dinner at Amarin. Midway through, I remembered that I left the aloe in my car.

Me: "I need to give the aloe vera to Tristan after dinner. Everyone remember this. Associate it with getting up from our chairs, please. As we rise to leave, remember the aloe. Remember the aloe."

Tom: "Is that like, 'Remember the Alamo'?"

rice rockets

My brother bought a car yesterday, from a good friend of mine.



It's a 9-year-old Honda Accord, which is by definition a better car than mine. Since I have a 9-year-old Honda Civic. A pic of my car, from when I was robbed a few years ago:



Perhaps we will get our cars serviced together this weekend.

Tom: "I'm going to put a big ol' racing stripe along the side!"

then she made me do thirty push-ups

Talking to Megan (my personal trainer) during my training session today.

Me: [while doing bicep raises] "I got invited to a black-and-white event."

Megan: "Oooh! What are you going to wear?"

Me: "There's a simple black dress I've had for a while."

Megan: [waving hand dismissively] "Hey, let's go shopping at Christian Dior!"

Me: "I don't know..."

Megan: "The butterfly cut is hot right now. Don't you want a dress that's in vogue?"

Me: "No."

Megan: "Why not?"

Me: "Anyway, I'm sure my date won't care what dress I wear."

Megan: "So what? You'll appreciate it, right? Look, I've gone on dates just to wear certain dresses. I was like, 'I'm dating my dress right now, and I love him!""

Me: "Your dress is a him? Shouldn't it be female?"

Megan: "When it's on top of me, it's a guy."

Me: "Fair enough."

Megan: [demonstrating a push-up followed by a jump] "Do ten of these."

Me: [starting push-up] "Anyway, you've seen my fashion sense. We've gone out, and I was dressed fine."

Megan: [observing my push-up] "Fine for a regular -- Niniane! Why are you wearing two differently colored socks?"

Me: "Okay, sometimes you gotta work with what you have. In the gym bag."

Megan: "You're wearing one piggy sock and one black sock, and you say your fashion sense is fine?"

Me: "My fashion sense knew that mismatched socks are wrong! I just didn't have a choice!"

Megan: "I am definitely taking you shopping. You need me in your life."

Me: "I'm not sure about this."

Megan: "Relax, we'll get something classic, and elegant. I'm not going to make you wear a freakin' banana on your head."

Me: "Good, because a banana is neither black nor white."

Megan: [clenching arms] "I'm really trying not to smack you right now."

Me: "Unless it's Banana Republic."

ha ha h -- wait a minute, you're insulting me too

niniane: it's coming up close on your last day...
Domino: yeah
Domino: if I were to stay, I might join the XXX team.
Domino: their manager is good
niniane: so i hear
Domino: and trustworthy
niniane: yeah, that's important in a manager. And not always easy to find
Domino: why would good and trustworthy people become managers?

it was good

So, I'm a shell of the human being I was before. There is a lot to do, for work and for my family.

Anyway, one nice thing from last week was dinner at Wenarto's house. Wenarto cooked us capon:

A capon is a cockerel (a male chicken) whose reproductive organs were removed at a young age. Typically, the castration is performed when the chicken is between 6 and 20 weeks old.

Supposedly the castration makes the chicken fatter. And happier, if memory serves me correctly. Because it doesn't have to stress over chasing the hens around?

basic instructions, the comic strip

Is everyone else already aware of the comic strip "Basic Instructions"? I might be lagging behind the crowd again, like with Dinosaur Comics and xkcd.

Anyway, I discovered it recently, and I'm now a huge fan.

of sour grapes and godiva chocolates

Much appreciation to all the people who left supportive comments about my family situation. I am especially grateful to Nina, who wrote:

People who maintain a reservoir of Zen calm while a relative is in the ICU probably have something wrong with them anyway.

This sour-grapes mentality is precisely what I needed. Thank you Nina!

Lately I keep remembering an incident from a few years ago. It was a small act of kindness, but I've been thinking of it almost daily.

The incident also involved a relative in a hospital. The illness and person in question were different, but there were similar harrowing qualities of waiting in a hospital room.

After an exhausting 24 hours in the ER, my dad and I stopped at a shopping mall on the way home. I went to a Godiva chocolate store to buy a gift basket for the hospital workers.

The saleswoman came over, as I stood before a shelf with small and large baskets. She asked if she could help, and what kind of basket I was looking for.

"I want one with variety," I said. "It's for doctors and nurses in an ER. Something they can grab quickly as they're walking by."

She paused, then walked to a different shelf behind the register. "You probably want one with both solids and cremes..."

We discussed whether to get one giant box or two medium-sized boxes. I decided on two, for variety. I paid. She wrapped up the basket in plastic with a bow, whle she watched me write the card. My dad stood off to the side, stepping in only once with tips for the card.

We finished the transaction. As I turned to go, the saleswoman reached into the display case and pulled out a chocolate truffle, then another. "For you and your dad," she said, "on the house."

It really stayed with me, this touch of kindness in an otherwise purely professional transaction. The saleswoman probably forgot about it years ago, but I doubt I ever will.

I hope that I showed enough appreciation at the time, to encourage her to do it again for others in the future.

i know how i want to be, but i can't seem to do it

I'm having a difficult time.

A relative is in the hospital, and my mother is staying with me indefinitely while she takes care of him. For a little while, we went together to the hospital. Now she takes the caltrain every morning to the hospital (and back to my townhouse in the evening), while I go to work.

Seeing my relative in the hospital is painful, but this post is not about that.

I keep losing my patience with my mother, over silly things. She turns off her cell phone for hours at a time, and I worry when I can't reach her. When I ask her for the condition of our relative, she tells me a ten-minute chronological tale of the day ("I got up at 7am, cooked some congee, and walked to the caltrain station..."). I have to listen to the entire story to distill it to a single sentence of how my relative is faring. My mother bemoans her lack of time, but refuses to accept any of my offers (such as renting her a car, or giving her cab money).

We're going through a cycle where I speak impatiently to her, and then I feel guilty. I try to call her to make amends, and her phone is off for five hours, and we return to the start of the cycle.

Our whole family is under a lot of stress, so the minor tiffs are not too surprising. But, ideally I would have a reservoir of Zen calm.

Maybe I will try to take more deep breaths, and meditate in the morning and evening.

I know this post is crappily written, without any beginning or ending, nor interesting dialogue or detail. Consider it a window into the past, of how every post on my blog was three years ago.

my favorite April Fool's joke

People have been sending out April Fool's emails all day. But nothing can measure up to my all-time favorite, from Peter Norvig in 2004:

In related news, Google today announced the soft launch of a new chain of restaurants called TG-TF-IDF. (We wanted to use the catchier "Thank God its Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency", but that domain was taken by a cybersquatter.)

Whereas traditional restaurants feature hard-to-use menu systems, the TG-TF-IDF restaurants will allocate a gigacalorie of food to each diner. Diners then enter keyword ingredients and are instantly presented with a list of meals. "If a user has a problem with food, so do we," said Sergey Brin, Google co-founder and president of technology, in a statement. The service will be free, but will feature targeted ads printed on the right hand side of the food.

"And while developing TG-TF-IDF was a bit more complicated than we anticipated, we're pleased to be able to offer it to the diner who asked for it."

Google's system was designed by one of its engineers as a "20 percent" project - the scheme which gives Google employees one day a week in which to work on projects that interest them, the company said.

In contrast to the 1Gcal of free food offered by TG-TF-IDF, McDonalds offers a maximum meal size of 1190 cal for $4.99.

multi-way replication is surely as trustworthy as God

Yesterday, Tom and I were talking about advanced medical directives. In my living trust, Tom holds power of attorney in case I cannot make my own medical decisions.

Me: "Do you still have the email I sent you?" (When I set up the living trust, the lawyer explained that Tom would likely experience guilt if the situation transpired. He said it would ease my brother's burden if I explicitly state my wishes beforehand, which I did so in email.)

Tom: "Oh, I've definitely kept that email."

Me: [nodding]

Tom: "Do you also have it printed out and stored somewhere?"

Me: "No. It only exists in email."

Tom: "That's the only copy?"

Me: "Yes. In Gmail I trust."

i realize the system is flawed if dinner involves eating pig knuckles

I woke up this morning at 7:45am and couldn't sleep, so I'm going to write about a predicament.

Chinese culture has various protocols. For example, let's say you're eating dinner at a restaurant with others.

Host: "Try this duck. It's great!"

One typical response is to demur out of courtesy.

You: "That's all right, you go ahead."

The problem is that people will say this even when they actually secretly want to eat the duck. Therefore, the expected response is for the host to redouble his efforts.

Host: "Really, taste the duck! [picking up a piece of duck, and leaning over to place it into your bowl]

You: [covering bowl with one hand] "Don't worry about me! You just take care of yourself. I'll be fine."

Host: "I insist!" [forcibly wedging duck past your hand into your bowl]

Now, the problem here is that even if you legitimately don't want the duck, there is no way to communicate this. Any refusal will be taken as courtesy.

You: "Oh my fucking God, please stop shoving this piece of duck into my bowl! Can you respect my free will!"

Host: "Why are you being so polite?" (Unfortunately this is not sarcastic.)

You could come up with an excuse, e.g. "I'm allergic to duck", "I just ate duck for lunch", "I'm vegetarian". But this wastes time, and would also be dishonest. Clearly the script needs to be amended.

What we need is a safe word. Something like "pig knuckles". Then you can distinguish situations where you genuinely want to say no.

You: "Can we put my backpack in your car trunk?"

Host: "Sure! [opens trunk which is packed full, starts rearranging items]"

You: "I didn't realize you had so much stuff in there. I'll just hold it on my lap."

Host: "No, that would be uncomfortable for you! Let me make this more compact. [folding clothes, collapsing boxes]"

You: "I changed my mind! I just want to go, okay?"

Host: "It'll only be another couple -- "

You: "Pig knuckles."

Host: [closes trunk, gets into driver's seat, starts engine]

...

Ah, that would be magical.

nostalgic Romulan story from growing up

My parents are in town. Last night we had dinner with my brother and some of my friends.

Tom told a story. When he was three and I was ten, we put on little plays for ourselves. Because there were only two of us, we each acted multiple roles. Tom was very cute as a toddler as tall as my knee.

One day, the theme was Star Trek. On the make-belief bridge of our starship:

Me: "Lieutenant."

Tom: [saluting]

Me: "We have a Romulan spy onboard. Go and scan decks 1 through 10 for the intruder."

Tom: [mimes shooting me with a phaser]

Me: "Did you just shoot me?"

Tom: [giggling] "Yeah."

Me: "No, the game is -- Why did you do that?"

Tom: [collapsing on the couch in giggles] "I'm the Romulan spy."

After I recovered from shock, I did a suitable death scene.

WTF Palo Alto

Don't I hear about how Palo Alto is the center of Silicon Valley? The hub of high-tech innovation? The leading edge of technology? The frontier of the information superhighway?

Why then did I have to go to three cafes along University Ave to find wireless internet?

Especially misleading was the fact that the first two cafes were filled with people on laptops. Apparently they were tweaking spreadsheets and writing papers offline.

Stock photos of the offending cafes:





Finally I went to a trusty standby (stock photo below). See if you can guess which cafe this is.

let there be light, and towels

In the latest wave of domesticity, I gave up my San Francisco crash pad.

Instead I'm buying new linens and towels for my Mountain View townhouse. It's bringing me incredible joy. I think I shall write a poem called "Ode to Two Thyme-Colored Towels".


The only thing stopping me is the knowledge that it can't measure up to my previous poem.

Tonight I found this beautiful light fixture for my master-bedroom ceiling:


It comes with this disclaimer.

Attention California residents: This product contains lead, a chemical known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.

Why are the cancerous effects of lead only known to the state of California? Does our state government exercise more caution about our health? Or are residents of California are more likely to lick the light fixture, ingesting the lead chemicals?

Comments from other buyers say the stained glass dampens the light, dimming the room. That could be depressing. Perhaps I will use higher-wattage bulbs than the recommendation.

Maybe that is the type of state-of-California thinking that leads to electrical fires and lead poisoning.

you gotta have your standards ... mine's H.264

Dan: "Yeah, wait until you're standing at a press conference next to your philandering man, with a tear in your eye."

Me: "I will NOT be standing next to him with a tear in my eye. I will wear sunglasses."

Dan: "Oh?"

Me: "No, actually I would be making a youtube video of me destroying all of his belongings."

Dan: [chuckling]

Me: "Now in higher definition."

Chinese parents need to stop forcing their kids to play the piano/violin

A few years ago, the news reported a spate of Chinese children cutting off their own pinky finger, so that their parents would stop forcing them to play the piano. These kids detested the piano, but their parents wouldn't listen, so they mutilated themselves as a desperate measure.

Today I will write about why it's bad to force your kids to play the piano over their continuous objections.

(This also applies to the violin or trombone or any musical instrument.)

I am not talking about the case where little Jimmy likes the piano and occasionally gets stuck, and his dad delivers a pep talk that gets Jimmy over the hump and back to happy-land. I'm also not talking about the case where the kid vacillates between liking and disliking the piano, and his mom encourages him to stick with it long enough to give it a fair chance.

I'm talking about the situation where a kid has played the piano long enough to know whether he likes it (let's say a year), and then consistently states his dislike of it, over the course of many months. In that case, the parent should let him quit. Alas, many do not. Many parents, especially Chinese ones, resort to years of threats, cajoling, bribery, shouting to force their child to continue.

This harms the child much more than the benefit he gets from playing the piano.

The merits of learning a musical instrument are oft repeated by the well-intentioned parent:
- learning discipline
- enjoyment later in life
- Mozart makes you smarter

Rarely have I heard anyone discuss the damage done by forcing the kid. I can state it in one sentence:


By thwarting the child's natural inclinations, day in and day out, you teach him to stifle his intuition.


There is a popular book Now, Discover Your Strengths, which is lauded amongst many Fortune 500 companies. Its premise is that people achieve maximum success (and enjoyment) by channeling their time into activities that they enjoy and excel at, and minimize time spent on tasks they dislike or struggle with.



As an example, let's say an executive loves coming up with new product strategy, and hates public speaking. Instead of getting a speaking coach to do hours of remedial training, the executive would focus his time on strategy and hire a representative to give talks on his behalf.

Of the people I've met over the years, the most successful ones followed this philosophy.

Another thing they do is follow their intuition. They trust their gut, and then learn from the outcome, which hones those instincts. Over a lifetime, their intuition becomes attuned to coming up with the next innovative idea, or the smartest strategy.

This is the very thing that takes a blow when the parent insists that the child ignore his passionate biases. It may be good for raising a drone -- a slightly smarter than average drone if we believe the Mozart effect. But if you want to foster creativity and that precious spark of innovation? Trust your kid to know their own mind.


When I was 13:

Me: "I want to quit the piano."

My mom: "No."

[many variations on this]

My mom: "When you grow up and become an adult, you'll thank me."

Me: "I will not."

...

I was right.

i miss Tom

Tom and I have both been busy, so I haven't seen him much over the past two months, except for my dad's birthday.

I miss his goofiness.

My friend "Fred" told me yesterday that his brother is moving to a different city. He wasn't too affected. This mindset of not being close to your siblings is foreign to me.

Some photos of the funniest times with Tom:



Provoking an innocent camel.



Eating.

I accidentally forgot my camera at the restaurant, after taking this photo. When I went back the next day to retrieve it, the employees had looked through all my photos, and were especially amused at this one.



LOLing.



LOLing while eating.

the point of life?

I've been thinking again about what the ultimate purpose of life is.

For example, one purpose could be to maximize the value you contribute to the world. An alternative would be to build deep bonds with your family. Or to savor each moment to the fullest.

Or, if you are into cop-out answers, it could be a blended approach that merges all of the above, because no one metric is the right answer, and you need balance, blah blah.

Last Sunday, at the Wynn Casino buffet with my family, I posed the question to my mother.

Me: "What do you think is the most important quality to strive for?"

My mother: "Integrity. It is not merely the most important. It's the only quality that matters."

Me: "Oh really. So let's say I had failed out of school and couldn't hold down a job, but I have the same level of integrity as I do now. You'd be equally happy with me?"

My mother: "Yes."

Me: [to my dad] "What do you think?"

My dad: [smiling] "That is so not true."

...

Recently I'm leaning toward using the metric of "doing things which are intrinsically enjoyable".

This goes against my chinese upbringing. When I was young, and my mother wanted me to stop doing enjoyable things (reading sci-fi) and waste the time on unenjoyable things (playing the piano), she quoted the chinese saying "先苦后甜" ("first bitter, then sweet"). The idea is that taking your bitter medicine will help make your future life sweet.

This reminds me that I need to write a blog post about how Chinese mothers need to stop forcing their kids to play the fucking piano/violin.

Anyway, this metric has clear flaws. Putting gas into my car is not intrinstically enjoyable. But I should do it to avoid running out of fuel on the highway and having to walk two miles in the dark to the nearest gas station.

I could amend it to "doing things that are intrinsically enjoyable, or that will save me from much worse things in the future".

ambulance post

Today's entry from the well-known blog of a UK ambulance driver;

I'm driving on this particular shift, my crewmate is in the back dealing with the patient.

I'm grinding my teeth at the waste.

The patient is almost certainly going to die - he's taken an overdose. The tablets he's taken, and the way he's taken them, mean that parts of his body will start to fail over the next few days. His immediate future is hospital bed, then an ITU bed, then either waiting for a transplant or death. It's too late for any treatment to work on him.

He's not in any pain, he doesn't feel weak, he has no symptoms.

...

Read the full post.

photos of food and castle

Mocha from Coupa Cafe. The cream was originally in a star shape (imagine the top half mirrored onto the bottom half).

I drank a sip, and it became an owl.

Naturally, preservation of the owl became key. The next ten minutes saw me crouching over the cup in strange contortions each time I wanted to take a sip.


I promised to take Megan to a vegan restaurant to celebrate her birthday. She chose Cafe Gratitude, in San Francisco. I braced myself for unsatisfying raw vegetables.

How wrong I was!

The menu items are phrased as affirmations. My mint chocolate chip milkshake is "I am Cool". Our appetizer of crackers and hummus was called "We are Bountiful". I rather enjoyed ordering:

Waitress: "What can I get for you?"

Megan: "I am Elated, and I am Honored. We are Bountiful. My friend here wants 'I am Cool'. Oh, also, I am Extra Green."

To my shock, the food was actually tasty. It's much better than the majority of non-vegan food.



The inside of the cafe. My stomach is not used to the food, so by the time we left, I actually felt a little like vomiting. Nonetheless, I went back again the following night.

The tables carry a fun card game, with questions like "Name three things you love about the other players."

The best one was a multi-part card. Part one was "Who do you hold a grudge against?" We wracked our brains and described people from our distant past who wronged us. The next part read, "Pretend the other player is the person you hold a grudge against. Now apologize for holding a grudge for so long."

That card owned us good!


Hearst Castle.


View from the castle.

The tour talked about how Hearst lived with his wife for twenty-odd years, and she bore him five sons.

Then he fell in love with Marion Davies, his "true love match", who lived with him for 40+ years until his death. His wife was very amicable. She lived across the country in New York, and would telegraph before arrival so that Marion Davies could duck out during her stay.

Upon Hearst's death, he left his property and a significant chunk of stock to Marion Davies. She sold it to his widow for a penny, because she said, "I was with him for love, not money."

Meanwhile, Mrs. Hearst performed a number of charitable deeds in Manhattan. Bluebirds sang, and ponies ran happily in the meadow.

Then I came home, and read on wikipedia how it's commonly believed that Mrs. Hearst was a prostitute when Hearst met her. Also, Hearst was terribly jealous of Marion Davies and is suspected to have murdered a man during a jealous rage on a sailboat. Allegedly he used his money and influence to shush up the shooting. Finally, Marion Davies married someone else a week after Hearst's death.

Funny how they didn't mention any of that on the tour.


A pretty walkway.


The outdoor pool.

Hearst often changed his mind after a portion of the house was completed, and would order it torn down and rebuilt. This pool was recreated three times before he was satisfied.

The architect, Julie Morgan, worked on the house for 28 years. I wonder if she found it fulfilling to design a lavish castle (rather than yet another square office building), or whether it was frustrating to have Hearst switching his mind all the time.

i can cook

Tom and I are at my parents' house in Vegas, for my dad's 65th birthday.

We pressured my mother to cook a birthday dinner. She got totally into it, and this is the result:


My mother decided ten years ago that I do not know how to cook. Despite years of protests from me, culminating in my cooking a dinner that she ate and said was good, she still maintains that I cannot cook. I've given up. Now I go along with it.

During dinner tonight:

Me: "This stewed eggplant is better than at restaurants! And the chives in the dumplings are amazing."

My mother: "It's nice when people don't know how to cook, like Niniane. You can make any sort of food, and they appreciate it."

Me: [sighing]

...

(later)

Me: "What happens to kids whose moms don't know how to cook? Do they just suffer eating terrible food their whole childhood?"

My mother: "There are no mothers who cannot cook!"

Me: "All right, let me put the question a different way. What's going to happen to my kids?"

My mother: [laughing] "That's a good point. But... no! There are no mothers who can't cook!"

Tom: "Niniane, that means Mom thinks you'll never have kids."

Me:

hee hee obama

I don't like lolcat, but I do like lolcat parodies.

silicon valley humor

X showed me Y2Combinator:

Y2 Combinator is a new kind of firm: a company that starts companies that starts companies. We help company-starting companies through what is for many the hardest step, copying the Y Combinator site without making silly mistakes.

lol.

rating everyone

My dear friend Reza has a wonderful idea. Every one of us should receive a rating and reviews.

Imagine a world where people could easily point their cell phone at you and give you a plus or a minus vote. If you let someone merge in, the other driver can give you a small star. If you stop and help someone with a flat tire, you might get lots of stars. If you cut people off or cheat on the carpool lane, you get bad karma. That's similar to PageRank. We all look at reviews for movies, restaurants, books, hotels, etc. And we look at the star rating on youtube, netflix, etc. Why not have it for people?

You can read his full post here. It's like DontDateHimGirl.com expanded to all areas of life.

I endorse this idea!

It may make sense to separate the ratings along different axes: career, friendship, relationship. That way, a workaholic who ignores their significant other could have 5 stars on one axis and 0 stars along the other, as opposed to a confusing average of 2.5 stars.

To protect against spamming, you would enter a secret question for each category. Only people who are qualified to rate you would know the answer. For example, the work one could be "What is my desk location number?" so only your real coworkers could rate you.

Potential romance secret questions are left as an exercise to the reader.

This way, when my profile is posted, I won't immediately be voted down to 0 stars by thousands of angry Asian men.

More stats on the world. (updated)

It would be lovely if there was easy access to more fine-grained statistics about the world. It would help in making risk assessments.

For example, I enjoy creative writing. I'd like to estimate my chances of ever getting published. If it's low, e.g. 1%, I just won't bother sending out manuscripts. Instead I'll write solely for enjoyment.

A panel of authors once said that 10% of aspiring writers get published. This number is not helpful. The pertinent data would be a set of writing samples at various levels of ability. For each, it would aggregate the percentage of authors who eventually got published.

Burgeoning writers can then look for a level similar to their own (or ask friends to rate them) and get the associated probability.

Another example is marriage and divorce. Supposedly there are well-known factors that influence the probability of staying together. The well-touted 50% divorce rate is skewed by shotgun weddings, according to a story I heard. If you're not marrying due to unexpected pregnancy, your divorce probability falls below 50%. But it rises if you live together first. Your marriage also has a much better chance if the ratio of positive to negative interactions exceeds 5:1.

It would be nice if there exists a service where people could pay money to fill out a bunch of information about them and their significant other, and get a customized probability score. They might decide to ignore it, but at least curious people can get an assessment.

Another example is startups. 90% of startups fail. Are these startups with great founders and innovative product ideas? Or is it skewed by people who caught entrepeneur fever, without accompanying skills?

Stats are good. More detailed stats would be better.

---

Update

Some comments are along the lines of "I'm sure if J. K. Rowling knew her chances of getting published were very low , maybe she'd would have never written Harry Potter."

This completely misses the point of the spectrum-odds. J. K. Rowling is an amazing writer. She is a master of suspense. She weaves a spellbinding world. If she used the spectrum system I talked about, she would probably find that while overall odds of publishing are very low, the J.K. Rowling-specific odds are actually high.

Dan's comment captures this well:

Many of the comments are supporting ignorance. "You probably won't succeed, so it's best that you don't know the odds." Ridiculous: if the overall odds are against you, all the more reason to know the conditional odds.

Another set of comments imply "Don't give up writing just because the odds of publishing are low." Who said anything about giving up writing? If you actually read my post above, I said:

I'd like to estimate my chances of ever getting published. If it's low, e.g. 1%, I just won't bother sending out manuscripts. Instead I'll write solely for enjoyment.

The time spent on printing out manuscripts, binding them, and mailing them could be spent on doing more writing.

Why do we promote making blind decisions? Instead of saying, "The odds are low, so you should avoid discovering what they are." we should be saying, "The odds are low, and you should find out exactly what they are, so you can make a rational choice on whether you will try anyway."

Quantum Hoops!

Last night I went to see the documentary "Quantum Hoops" in Berkeley.



It follows the Caltech basketball history, focusing on the team's losing streak between 1985 through 2006 (the year the film was made). During all those decades, the Caltech basketball team did not win a single game.

I bought movie tickets online, for fear the showing would sell out. My companions laughed at this. They were right about the audience turnout. But we did run into a number of Techers in the theatre.

The documentary had a number of clips with the current coach:



He's so awesome.

He talks about how Caltech players put academics first, and the entire team has only six students who played high school varsity. They compete against colleges that offer basketball scholarships, where most players were starters on their high school varsity team.

Coach: Yeah, Caltech doesn't win championships the way UCLA does, or USC. [pause] But we have a few more Nobel prizes.

My favorite line in the film came when he talked about reducing the point spread from 60 points every game (in 2003) down to only 10 points (in 2006).

Coach: [very proudly] We're only losing by ten points this season. Winning has gone from impossible to improbable!

girltalk

At a big group dinner with Laura and Katherine, two Googlers that I see occasionally.

Katherine: These new "Sex in the City" ripoffs are so lame. Like the one with Lucy Liu. The characters are not believable.

Laura: The three of us need to make one.

Me: Where should it be set?

Katherine: Not here. Or NYC. Oh, it should be set in Rome.

Me: [appraising her] You could pass for being Italian.

Katherine: I AM Italian.

...

Me: Our show needs some kind of drama. Like, my character meets an Italian guy, and he's really cute. But it turns out he has chest hair.

Laura: Yeah! So much chest hair. But he's very sweet to you.

Me: Right, so my character is torn.

Laura: [offhandedly, while eating salad] The hair is on his back too.

Me: [recoiling]

Laura: He cooks dinner for you.

airport brainstorming

At SJC airport this afternoon, waiting to fly to LA for Google's company trip to Disneyland.

Me: "My last couple of blog posts were probably only funny to Googlers."

Dan: "No, they weren't funny even to me."

Me: "What the hell!"

Dan: [shrugging]

...

Five of us sat around a table at California Pizza Kitchen at the airport.

Jim: "XXX broke up after getting engaged."

Me: "Oh, why? He's such a nice guy!"

Jim: "I don't know the story. I just know he broke up."

Me: "If only there was some service that collates people's breakup stories. I want to know the details."

Bob: "This can be a Google product. Organizing the world's breakup information and making it universally accessible and useful."

Me: [laughing]

Dan: "Every day when you log into Gmail, there can be a text entry box, 'Did anything embarrassing happen last night?'"

funny streetview video

X showed me this video yesterday. I laughed so hard.

peanut gallery

At an internal tech talk, I'm standing in the back of the room with my Googler friend JA. We're listening to a presentation about some infrastructure.

Me: Wow, this is really cool. This is amazing. I can't wait to use this.

JA: Yeah. How much do you think XX [the speaker] contributes to Google?

Me: He's like the G that makes up Google.

... Later, the speaker finished, and a second speaker went to the podium.

Speaker #2: I'm going to talk about project Y. First, an overview of how Google search works. [shows slide with blob of "The Web" connected to "crawler" and then "indexer"] Now, some engineers here may not know what the indexer does.

Me: [whispering to JA] Really?

JA: [smiling] How about the crawler. What does that do?

Me: He should explain what "The Web" is.

JA: [gesturing toward the Google logo on every slide] Or what is "Google"?

so how much data was generated while we were talking?

A friend reminded me of this story last week, and it made me laugh.

A few months ago, I was talking to an engineer in a nearby cubicle.

Engineer: [describing his project which does some amazing stuff]

Me: "Wow, that's cool. How much data does that generate?"

Engineer: "X terabytes."

Me: [startled] "Woah!"

Engineer: "... per minute."

funny (to me, at least)

Me: "Dan, it turns out you're the #15 commenter on FriendFeed."

Dan: [very seriously] "So who are numbers one through fourteen then?"

---

I went to Hearst Castle earlier in the month. The library contained a tall vase with white lilies. I couldn't figure out whether the lilies were real, no matter how much I stared.

I was reminded of an incident from my childhood.

When I was eight, my uncle visited the US from China for a one-year fellowship. One day, my parents went to the bank to open a checking account, and took him and me along.

My parents sat at a bank representative's desk filling out the new account form. I pointed at the leafy plant on the desk and asked my uncle in Mandarin, "Is that plant real?"

My uncle replied, also in Mandarin, "Modern plastic plants are often very realistic. They look real, the texture feels real, and they even smell real. There's only one way to tell."

He snapped off a leaf between his fingers, and placed it in his mouth. After two chews, he announced, "Yup, this one's real." I nodded in satisfaction.

When I looked up, the bank rep was staring open-mouthed at us.

Later I considered it from the bank rep's perspective. A family comes into your bank to open a checking account. The uncle and niece speak to each other in Mandarin, and then out of nowhere, the uncle picks a leaf off your plant and eats it for no discernible reason.

I still laugh when I think of it.

sassy, in three parts

Eating brunch with a guy friend, at Foreign Cinema. He's talking about a girl he likes.

Friend: "I should invite her to an event. How can I do it casually?"

Me: "Pick something you know she likes to do. What are her hobbies?"

Friend: "She takes ballet classes."

Me: "Why don't you invite her to the San Francisco ballet?"

Friend: [raising eyebrow] "You realize that I would then also need to go to the ballet."

---

Over dinner at Ronald McDonald House, a mother is talking about her newborn who was born with her intestines outside of her body.

Mother: "They rushed her from my C-section immediately to the ICU. They hooked up a device so that her intestines are suspended over a cavity in her abdomen, and over the next few days, gravity pulled them back into her body."

Me: [shocked]

Mother: "But she wasn't gaining weight for the next two months. The doctor said it could be the [long medical term] condition, but he didn't want to do a test to check because that condition is so rare."

Me: "So what happened?"

Mother: "I told the doctor, 'Being born with your intestines outside your body is also extremely rare! Do the test!'"

(In happy news, the newborn later gained weight. Mother and daughter were discharged from the hospital today.)

---

Last month, I told my brother about a Stanford writing class I took. We were each asked to bring two pages of a published work from an author we admired. I brought Harry Potter, which was denounced by a middle-aged Indian student CJ for being "cliche". Another person brought the Foundation trilogy, and CJ criticized both Asimov's writing and science fiction in general.

Finally I asked what he brought. He announced that his "two pages from an author you admire" was his own published work. He proceeded to hand out copies of his story, each with a stapled photocopy of his acceptance letter to a local literary magazine.

Tonight, at the grocery store with my brother:

Me: "I'm taking another writing course. Guess who I saw on the first day. Remember that guy I told you about, who brought his own published work?"

Tom: "Of course I remember that dumbass."

Me: [shaking with laughter]

Tom: "Oh sorry, was I being too truthful?"

offspring ~ software

Today in the cafe I ran into a young Googler. We got to talking about his relationship, and he revealed that he's preparing to have kids soon.

Me: "Really? Are you ready for that?" [He's only 23.]

Him: "Is anyone ever ready?"

Me: "That's true."

Him: "It's like a work project, actually. You're not 100% sure that it'll work out, but you trust in the people doing it."

:)

MLK Day, redux

Last year's MLK Day was a comedy of errors on my part. Little did I know it would become an annual tradition.

I met Omst and Neha in the afternoon at Ritual Roasters. Neha is starting grad school at MIT, and the two of them are flying to Boston tonight. Once again I found myself saying "I will miss you" and "Send photos" and "I hate change".

The outflux of my friends moving away is significantly higher than the influx of new friends. If this trend continues, in two years I will have no friends living in the same city as me.

Then I can start acquiring my 19 cats, or my 1 pig.

After departing the cafe, I was greeted with a parking ticket on my windshield. The meter had run out fifteen minutes prior, and the parking maid had already come and gone during those minutes.

I wrote a check for the ticket and ran out in the rain to drop off the wet envelope in a mailbox. I drove to my nail appointment, got the address wrong, and arrived late after walking four blocks in the rain. The salon cancelled my pedicure, but still gave me a manicure.

It was shortly after dusk, the hour of melancholy, and I sat in my car looking at the torrent through the streetlamp lights. I decided the solution to fix this day was to go to Sugar Cafe. Specifically, I would go eat their mini-burgers and write on my laptop.

When I arrived, the barista informed me the kitchen closed early.

"I still see plates of mini-burgers coming out of your kitchen!" I protested, to no avail.

I sat down next to Sugar's gas fireplace with my laptop, and pressed the un-hibernate. To my absolute horror, nothing happened. The screen stayed black. My laptop made no acknowledgement of my action.

This has never happened before. Did it rain on the laptop earlier? How much work was on it that was not backed up?

Fortunately, after I arrived at home and plugged it in, the laptop turned on.

There's a xkcd comic, where the protagonist says after six hours of fiddling with his computer, "I'll be happy if I can just get it back to the state it was in before I started."

That describes my day today.

slightly amusing

Me: "Are you going to work on Monday? It's Martin Luther King Day."

"I need to check."

Me: "I'm not."

"Oh, is all of Google shutting down for the day?"

Me: "Yeah. [pause] Well, our web site will still be up, probably."

how can

I'm really disturbed that Britney Spears is dating this unattractive paparazzi cameraman.



Even in 2005, my friend said, "What happened? Two years ago she was the most unattainable woman in the world."

And now look.

How did this happen?

a few Paris photos

The breath-taking Museum d'Orsay.


One of the best paintings that I saw.


My friend Wenarto happened to be in Paris at the same time. We met up on New Year's outside of Louis Vuitton.

Wenarto was the only person along the Champ-Elysses who was dressed like this.


Sorollo House replaces my friend Eileen's house as the nicest house I've ever seen. (Sorry Eileen!) It combines high ceilings with gorgeous art by Sorollo.


Photo of the Louvre, from inside the Louvre.

My parents claimed they looked through the entire Louvre in one day.

Me: [surprised] "How did you manage that?"

My dad: "The last thirty minutes, we just walked nonstop through room after room."

Me: "Did you actually look at the art in the rooms?"

Dad: "Basically no. But we got through all the rooms!"


Tom performing "eater's pose" by my request, at a coffee shop in Madrid.

RSI

Three weeks ago, upon landing in Madrid, the pinky and ring finger of my left hand felt numb. I figured it was due to sleeping in a cramped pose during the flight.

The following week disabused me of that notion, as I developed pain in my deltoids, forearms, elbows, neck, and wrists. Around New Year, I stopped typing for five days.

Upon return to the US, I went to a doctor. He told me that I have blackberry thumb, tennis elbow, carpal tunnel, and tendinitis. I'm not sure why all of them appeared at the same time.

Part of the prescription involves cutting down on laptop and blackberry usage. A pity, as I used to enjoy lying in bed and typing emails to friends.

[land, home] of the [free, brave]

This morning, Tom and I got on a plane in Paris to fly back to SFO.

Tom has a cold, and has been blowing his nose every minute. I gave him a kleenex packet from my purse, but that wasn't enough. He collected both of our drink napkins throughout the flight.

Tom: "When we land in Philly [for our stopover], I'm going to buy some food and take FIVE HUNDRED NAPKINS. God bless America."

Me: [laughing] "You don't even need to buy food to take napkins, usually."

Tom: "Oh, I'm also hungry."

... We landed in Philadelphia, and started walking toward the customs area.

Tom: "Ah, America. Time to be fat and proud of it!"

Me: "You've got half of that down." [nudging him]

Tom: "That's right -- I'm very proud."

Me: [grinning] "Of course, that's what I meant."

Tom: "And you've got the other half covered."

Both of us laughed the entire way through the customs line.

parents funny

Walking around Madrid, my mom stops every few minutes to take a photograph. Each one requires many seconds of adjustment for the perfect angle and lighting.

Last Monday, we went to the Royal Palace. Midday:

My mom: "I have very sad news. My camera battery died."

My dad: [clapping loudly] "太好了！ 就等这件事呢！" ("Wonderful! Wonderful! It's just the news I've been waiting for!")

... We walk down the street and pass by the grand church next to the palace.



Dad: [poking my mom's elbow] "This church really deserves a photograph."

The rest of my family had to wait for me, to recover from being doubled over laughing.

...

Later, in the hotel room I was sharing with my brother:

Tom: "Mom takes so long with each photograph! We're always waiting."

Me: "I'm just happy that they're getting along. Let's not complain if the holy grail has a little bit of dust on it."

Tom funny

Sitting inside Notre Dame, under a projector screen spanning the church:

Program Announcer: "This 60-minute movie will tell you about the history of our church. It is intended for young and old alike..."

Me: [poking Tom on shoulder] "Did you hear that? It appeals to both you and me."

Tom: "No, they didn't say yuppies. [pointing to door] You have to leave."

---

Tom: [talking about how he recently gained weight]

Me: "How can you look the same, but weigh so much more?"

Tom: "I must have gotten denser as I aged. Same body, more mass. Or rather, same volume, more ass."

---

At a cafe inside the Louvre, holding a book we brought from the States.



Tom: "By the way, I agree that the Pocket Louvre sucks. I looked up 'Venus de Milo' and all it said was 'The Venus de Milo was unearthed in 1820.'"

Me: "Yeah, it's terrible. Feel free to just throw it away."

Tom: "Being in the trash can of the real Louvre would be the greatest thing that's ever happened to that book! I'm going to take it out of the Louvre before I throw it out."