Author: shun

Awakening

A person probably goes through hundreds, or maybe thousands, of “awakenings” in his lifetime. Some ideas I simply couldn’t grasp a few years ago seem so clear and obvious to me today. But observing and experiencing such awakenings isn’t always so easy. However, it’s very breath-takingly memorable and refreshing when Grace and I see it in Bryan as he becomes ever more aware of everything around him.

Ever since our last observation with Bryan’s awakening to his hands, it seems like he’s suddenly seeing the world through a completely different perspective. To illustrate this, take Grace’s observation of Bryan at our neighbor’s: Bryan was excited to see some kittens as our neighbor fed them. So he started clapping his hands to show “approval” (as in, “yes, this is worthy of my clapping hands) and his excitement. The he proceeded to take the neighbor’s hands and waved them in the motion of clapping hands. Bryan was trying to teach our neighbor how to clap hands to share his joy!

Life is good.

More Car Woes

As Professor Farnsworth would put it, “Good news, everyone. We are going to get a new car!”

After Tibor did the initial quick fix with the transmission, everything went well for a few days. Then yesterday the transmission decided it was going to work only in the 3rd gear and nothing else (not even 1st or 2nd gear). Literally. Even “neutral” and “reverse” gears simultaneously decided they were “park”. I almost got stuck in a parking lot and couldn’t get out because I had no “reverse”… As a result, I came to the conclusion that a car without “reverse” is pretty useless (unless it’s a tank or, similarly, a Humvee). It’s kind of like driving a car that can only turn left….

To make the long story short, I made it all the way from Hayward to Tibor’s shop in Mt. View…. in third gear. Imagine the massive amount of gas I wasted.

Maybe poor people aren’t meant to have cars. Maybe this is a sign that we should start getting used to the San Jose public transit system.

Clap Clapty Clap

Lazy Friday afternoon…. the whole family was in the livingroom… just hanging out. Suddenly Bryan curiously looked at his hands, then his fingers and then he finally realized that he has the will to control every aspect of them — he turned his wrists, bent his fingers one by one, made fists then extended the fingers. He thought, “WOW!”

As Grace and I watched in amazement, I showed Bryan what he could do with his palms — clapping! He was so excited with his new skills that he laughed, giggled and clapped for the next five minutes with Grace and I encouraging him and cheering him on the whole time.

Magic moments like what we experienced this afternoon made the hardship of parenthood worthwhile (a little more).

Temporary Fix

Tibor had my car ready the same afternoon I sent the car in on Tuesday. He said he cleaned the gears and fixed a wire which apparently was the culprit of the transmission incident. But Tibor said the gears are all pretty worn out that the tranny might go within a year (maybe sooner).

So the car runs like a champ again. And Tibor didn’t charge an arm and a leg for it. He even said if we decide to get the tranny replaced (an eventuality), he’ll give me a break on this job because he said this job was almost like a pre-requisite to diagnose any kind of transmission problem. And it doesn’t make sense for him to charge me twice for it. You can’t find an honest mechanic like Tibor anymore!

But we think we’ll have to replace the car with something a little more reliable soon. After our investment in fixing the engine, any additional pay outs for major fixes would make the car cost more than its worth. Plus now we have a baby, it makes sense that we get a car that we don’t have to worry about. So maybe we’ll do what Murdza did and get a certified pre-owned.

Car Woes

How much can you bear to spend on an used car before you ditch it for a newer one?

Our Inifiniti J30t broke down on my way home after my doctor’s appointment on Saturday, 2 hours before I was supposed to pick up my cousin from the airport. To make the story short, we ended up towing the car nearby the Car Clinic where we normally have Tibor to look into car problems.

So what happened to the car? Basically the transimission died in the middle the highway. Luckily I was the only passenger in the car. The situation would have gotten way more complicated if Bryan was also in the car. So for the sake of safety and peace of mind, perhaps we should be looking at something newer… That’s $$$ down the drain!

Argh!

Thanks to the long weekend, we won’t be able to do anything about it until Tuesday the earliest.

Drawn Blood

Bryan went in for a scheduled check up last week. As part of the routine, the doctor wrote him up to get a blood sample to run some tests.

Bryan's arm after blood was drawn

According to Grace, Bryan cried REALLY hard as the nurse was looking for his vain to poke a hole in for the blood sample. Nearby toddlers cried their lungs out as they got their blood drawn… I don’t know how I ever got through childhood having to visit the doctors so many times with so many damn shots… I wonder when painless shots will arrive given how medicine has gone through miracle phases in the past century…

Bryan cried so hard on the way home that he fell asleep. But then when he woke up, he picked up right where he left off and started crying as if someone turned his “crying mode” back to “ON” again… Poor baby… but it was a pretty damn funny scene.

A Master, Finally

I got up early today for my micro-economics. And then I came home only to find out that Widodo and Hanny had invited us to their BBQ… Watched Spiderman 2 again… It was a pretty relaxing Saturday.

Tired, exhausted and eyes seriously itchy from the seasonal allergy, I came home to seeing a big, white envalope with a huge SCAD logo sticking out of the mailbox.

It could only be one thing… But… it couldn’t be. Katharine Harris told me she only sent out my diploma on May 18. How could it have arrived within 2 days all the way from the East Coast?

But sure enough, it was my Master of Fine Arts diploma for Interactive Design and Game Development.

SCAD MFA Diploma

Now only if I have a good/big enough body of work to land on one of those “interactive design” teaching positions…

Either way, I am pretty psyched about finally getting this damn degree after having started the program back 1998. Then in 2000, a startup came calling and subsequently occupied all of my attention when I was merely one class away from completing the degree (only this startup story didn’t end quite as “romantically” ).

Fast forward to 2005: After 5 years of nagging from my mom, laughters from Murdza and hundreds of “are you done with your thesis” inquiries, I finally re-enrolled in SCAD’s e-learning system (which, by the way, is far more superior copmared to UC System), took a make-up class and finally finished my thesis in Feburary, 2006.

SCAD could have been really nasty, greedy (as many people contend that it is) and made me take all kinds of classes to make up for the 5 years I was away from the program. But it turned out that SCAD’s support system worked extremely efficiently and took care of me and my degree. Most impressively, all this was done via correspondence through emails, phone calls and official documents from SCAD. This is the kind of stuff that makes me endorse SCAD and [most of] its staff/faculty without any inhibition*.

One Master down, what’s next?

* If anyone from SCAD’s administration is reading this, please get rid of Jeff Jones. He’s one useless scum who’s ruining SCAD’s reputation everytime he deals with another human being on behalf of SCAD. Seriously, ask any International student and get the true story.

Neighbor

An old lady moved in next door after the previous neighbor moved out three months ago. She’s into rescuing cats and all that good stuff. She’s managed to catch two cats and got them “fixed” since she moved here. We wish we’d known that Palo Alto Animal Services can do a relatively cheap “catch and release” program without putting the animals down. After our last experience with the San Jose animal shelter, we decided not to do the animals any favors… But what Palo Alto is doing seems like a pretty good idea…

So anyway… back to the neighbor… She has decided to move out of the neighborhood despite having only lived in her new apartment for only about a month. She thought the neighborhood is not up to her standards because we have a few Hispanic neighbors who like to play their music a little loud. Within days of moving in, she’d already verbally exchanged “kind words” with them about their music (which never really bothered us). This reminds me of an NPR (more like “This American Life” ) episode with Mr. Rogers. The segment had a scenario exactly like this — dealing with loud neighbors. When people know each other, what someone else does doesn’t really bother one another quite as much. But when nobody knows each other, friction seems to get picked up a lot more quickly.

I guess we’ll be welcoming a new neighbor soon.

Bump

Bryan fell earlier this week. He landed on a piece of area rug where it made a “grill” impression on his forehead.

Bryan's grill impression

Doctor said it will be permanent. So much for a cute-looking boy. Well, at least we have lots of pictures of him WITHOUT the mark. He looks like he was branded by some Medieval lord…
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Did I say the mark was going to be permanent? Just kidding…

He did cry pretty hard though… Broke our hearts. Good thing kids are resilient and built relatively tough (relatively tougher than my stupid spine which has been killing me).
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Bryan was finally able to steadily feed himself small pieces of cheerios today (cheerio goes into the mouth as opposed into the nose or the chin). It was really cool to see. Speaking of cool stuff, he signed “milk” earlier today which freaked me out. But then he wouldn’t do it again on command. So it’s not exactly a circus show piece yet… Maybe in another month… then we can put him on the streets of downtown San Jose to beg for money, especially now that he can sit up relatively well too… I bet we can double the income if we can train one of our cats to jump through fire…

Be A Movie Producer for $100

An interesting article from “The Economist” (thanks, Jason and “A”!) about how India’s rapidly growing movie industry is thinking differently:

Thanks to a boom in urban multiplex cinemas, the economics of Bollywood filmmaking is changing. Small-budget productions, often made by debutant directors experimenting with genres-such as “Being Cyrus”, a twisted tale of a dysfunctional Parsi family in Mumbai-are now finding audiences and critical acclaim. Big Bollywood players are taking notice: “Iqbal”, another recent release, was financed by Subhash Ghai, a powerful producer.

One group of aspiring directors hopes to avoid Bollywood altogether. The makers of “Betelnut Killers” are using a website to solicit “investments of as little as $100” to raise $1m for their film about an Indian shopkeeper in a small American town who plots to get rid of an unwelcome rival. The word “investment” suggests an eventual pay-off, and indeed there is, according to the site-a credit at the end of the yet-to-be-made movie, a T-shirt crowing “Co-producer, Betelnut Killers” and exclusive rights to contribute to a blog. By early May, contributions totalled almost $14,000.

The website actually offers a fairly complete proposal on many aspects of the project. So if you ever want to put “Movie Producer” as a credit on your resume, this is the time to do it… 🙂

On a related news, Patrick has decided to let his hair grow until he sells his next movie script (or so he threatened his agent). Apparently Hollywood is a bitchy industry to be in… His wife, Ee-bin, said Patrick’s hair is now growing nice and long. I told Patrick if he still has his hair by Christmas, I’d buy him a dress! Hah!

Personality Creeping Out

Bryan’s been demonstrating some real personality traits in the past few weeks. Ever since birth, we have noticed nothing more than the fact that he smiles a lot (and cries when he sees Jason and “A” ). But now we are also noticing his strong personality traits when he likes or dislikes something. But then again, I am sure it happens to all 9-month-old babies.

Another interesting thing we noticed about Bryan is his newfound ability to associate a series of events based on prior experience. For example, when we change his cloths and puts him in his infant car seat, he now knows we are taking him out. So if Grace tricks him by taking him out of the car seat again, he complaints as if he’s saying, “I thought we are going out! I want to go… I want to go… I want to go…”

Bryan is also showing some of those “manipulative” sides of him when he wants attention. Sometimes I purposely don’t pay attention to him when he plays (we usually know he wants our attention when he plays as his big eyes look our way). He will then proceed to fall on his back and makes fussing sounds (he can’t sit up on his own yet) to get my attention — it’s really cute and funny… But I have a feeling this is going get really old really fast when he turns 3 or something… (or maybe it won’t).

Best Animated TV Sitcom Ever!

Wow… Has it really been almost a week since I last posted that short entry on the baby blogs? Time flies.

I “got” all five seaons of Futurama and have been watching them one or two episodes everyday. It’s truly a great show with so much stuff in every episode. I don’t know how they can come up with so many ideas, work them all in an episode and cram them out in animated series. Simpsons have been good, but I think Futurama tops it with Bender — sort of a “blend” of Homer and what Bart will grow up to be.