FriendBurst Blog

Some random stuff that’s been happening lately.  The title was just an attempt to pull together in a single sentence the three themes below.

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Last week, I was out and about and quite hungry, so I went to wonderful Asian Buffet place in Lynnwood for lunch.  This place is AWESOME and not a bad value.  For $8.50, you get unlimited access to wide variety of Asian delicacies ranging from soups, fried yummies, sushi, Korean BBQ, crab legs, all the mainstream Chinese dishes and of course, the frozen yogurt machine at the end of the feast.  I probably consume 3 or 4 thousand calories when I hit the Asian buffet.

I was struck last week by a glimpse of myself in the future, and was some disturbed by what I saw.  There, at the table next to me was a fairly obese man chowing down on an overflowing plate full of nothing but Korean BBQ ribs.  I’m not exactly svelte, but my immediate reaction might be one that anyone would have seeing an obese person at an all-you-can-eat establishment, indulging his gluttony with abandon.  I wondered if the owners of the establishment dreaded seeing him walk in the door.  A buffet is in some ways, a competition when it you look at it from a bottom line perspective.  Can the place make a profit offering you all the food you want for $8?  That depends on how much, and what, you eat.  This guy was going for the most expensive meat and consuming huge quantities of it.  He was “winning”.

As I watched him out of the corner of my eye, I contemplated our different approaches to the buffet dining experience.  Me, I’ll load up my plate with a little bit of everything.  I will like some things more than others, but the variety and contrasts in flavors is part of the experience, IMHO.  This man, he had founf the one thing he liked more than anything else and was maximizing his enjoyment of it.

He was eating somewhat distractedly, as all his attention on the science fiction paperback that he held in his non-rib-consuming hand.  It looked as if he had not showered that day and he was wearing flip flops.  He was alone.  Large patches of psoriasis covered his elbows and forearms, complete with red splotches of fresh scabs where he had picked at the dense matting of grayish, dead skin cells.  He looked to be in his early 50’s.

I was musing over how he was so intent on his book that he did not notice me staring at him.  Laughing at the fat guy at the buffet.  I stretched.  My back hurt a bit.  It’s been hurting a bit more than in the past, and I would be blind if I did not recognize that was due to the weight I’ve gained.  I’m like 30 pounds heavier than I was a few years back.  I stopped staring at the guy and went back to reading my book, which is really good and was really into.  I reached down to scratch through my jeans the psoriasis patches on my legs.  A small shower of dead skin cells powdered the industrial carpet at my feet as I sat there, alone.

Then it hit me.

OMG!  That guy… the one I was deriding in my head… that is ME in about ten years and 30 more pounds!  In many ways, that is me now!  Fat, alone, diseased, dulling my pain through an obsession with genre literature…

I wish there was a happy ending to this anecdote.  I wish I could say that the obese guy at the next table continued to eat nothing more than Korean ribs, because that might mean he was actually on the Atkins diet and was eating nothing but protein to lose weight (his next plate was loads of pot stickers and General Tso’s chicken)… as for me, my happy ending is still being written, but it is not often one gets to look in the mirror so profoundly while looking at someone else.

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There was a stabbing today at my school,  Edmonds Community College.

GOLDANGIT! I can’t get the local news coverage to embed properly here on this platform.  Here, just click this to open the video in a new window.

OMG!  Did you see me? I was on the news! That was me riding my bicycle at 1:42, talking to the two really cute girls in my morning class. I’ve never been on TV in my life and now TWICE in two weeks!

If I had not been 20 minutes late to campus due to my internet addiction, I would have seen the whole thing go down.  See, it took place just feet away from the smoking section adjacent to the site of morning class.  Eye witnesses were still on hand even with my tardiness.  The victim of the assault came, bleeding, pleading for help to my fellow nicotine addicts.

The word is that it was an attempted robbery gone bad.  Student held up at knife point on campus at 9:20 AM…In the bathroom.  Damn.  Freaky bad.

I think I am addicted to the internet because I woke up this morning with plenty of time to get ready and get to the bus on schedule.  In fact, I had more than enough time, so I settled in to read and respond to a few blogs before class.  I didn’t pay attention to the clock and noticed the time 5 minutes too late.  This morning was not the first time this has happened this quarter.  See, one of the hallmarks of an addiction is that you continue with the harmful behavior even when it has negative impacts on your life.  I was probably late to class 20% of the time this quarter.  Mind you, I am still on track to maintain a 3.9 GPA, but it still bugs me being late.  I couldn’t get away with this if it were, say, a job.

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As far as class goes, I am somewhat nostalgic as I wind down the last two weeks in my one-year hiatus from the world of work.  It’s time to present final projects and I am going all out.  Everyone in class was like, “Wow, you made that video?” when I showed them all the following as the multi-media piece in my presentation for my working with diversity class tonight.

As I blogged about earlier, the assignment was a Personal Cultural Reflection.  I chose to read an excerpt from my grandfather’s book about his ancestors (note: it is not entirely historically accurate, but it was still easy and fun to make)… a bit of the history of the Irish people…

School has given me plenty to blog about this year, both here and previously on MySpace.  I promise you that whatever I get this summer, there will plenty to blog about originating there as well.