"Someone must feel like a fool tonight"

(I finally remembered to ask the DJ about this song. It is "Someone must feel like a fool tonight" in the album "Back Home Again" by Kenny Rogers. A sweet ballad and a great dance song as well. Notice: sound will start around 0:00:05 in the video.)

Someone must feel like a fool tonight

knowing they let you go.

Someone is wishing they`ve done you right

regreting they hurt you so.

Now that you`re here in my loving arms.

Forget all your yesterdays.

Someone must feel like a fool tonight

For letting you slip away.

When I see the moon shining in your eyes

A feeling comes over me.

The warmth of your touch makes me realize

Just how lucky can I be.

Surely he knows and he`s sorry now

That he turned your love away.

Someone must feel like a fool tonight

Knowing you`re here to stay.

Something good may happen, occasionally.

My life sucked recently. However, something (as fabulous as an "unexpected visitor", I mean it in a very POSITIVE way) good happens, occasionally to make your life, er, suck less.

Guilty, doubled

I got a long-distance phone call from my mom last Friday night with sad news that my grandfather, the father of my mom, just passed away. My mom was hardly able to speak in the phone. I could only caught pieces of sentences in between her sobs. I tried to calm her down and comfort her while I was trying to recover from the shocking news. I guess that I went numb at that moment because I didn't cry, not that I was holding it, until the very end of the phone conversation of about forty minutes.


I felt guilty. As soon as I hung up the phone, I felt guilty b/c I, as the ONLY child in the family, could not be there with my mom during the hardest time for her since my dad passed away. I know that she needs nothing more than a hug from me NOW, but I can't because I am so far away, separated by the Pacific, from her. I never feel myself as so HELPLESS.

While I was blaming myself for not being with my mom, all of a sudden, it occurred to me that my first feeling about the news had not been feeling sad about my grandfather's death. I was shocked though later I realized that it was not surprising given the kind of grandfather-grandchild relationship b/w us. My grandfather and I were never close at all in my whole life. I am not sure about him thoughts. For me, I just behaved as a well-behaved grandchild, visiting them regularly, helping with some housework during my visit, calling them regularly while I am abroad... Although this sounds cold-blooded, he is someone whom I care about simply because he is my mom's father. It was more about blood-bond than emotion-bond. In addition, my mom is a very filial daughter, I believe that I must have inherited part, if not all, of the virtue from her. Anyway, I didn't feel so sad about his death because we were never close enough, which ironically seems not too bad at this moment because I would feel less pain now.

I dwelt on this point for a while and felt overwhelmed with guilty, doubled guilty.

Mission accomplished.

Whatever...

Downtown Phoenix in 1 word: boring; Downtown Phoenix in 2 words: very boring

I was at a conference held in the convention center in downtown Phoenix since last Saturday. In general, the conference sucked, full of sh#tty researches (I'll talk about that later), though not very surprising to me. What bothered me most was the BORING dowtown area of Phoenix. There are a couple of high-rises, but most of them are just hotels and others all have names of some banks/companies over the top.

I arrived on Saturday and Monday was a holiday. It seemed to be a DESERTED area in those couple of days: you hardly saw any local people.: For three days, all the small diner-like places were CLOSED! No kidding. We checked out 4 closed restaurants (1 Japanese, 1 Thai, 1 breakfast-&-lunch place, and 1 Italian) before finally had lunch at an Irish bar on Sunday. In a word, there is not a single decent restaurant within walking distance. Okay, maybe one, 'My Big Fat Greek Restaurant'. The food was decent, though my PI still had a lot of complaints. You can eat on a outdoor patio facing small fountain and small waterfalls. There were heaters in the ceiling to keep you warm and sometimes they even lit some tiki torches as well. However, it is still a weird restaurant. We first went there on Monday evening. It was a pleasant dinner (other than they sold out the wine and beer we really wanted) until the waitress came over to say "Good night" for the third time and it was not even 9:30pm yet. The night after, when I was hanging out with some friends from one of my committee members' lab (not expected him to be there as well), two other PIs joined us and started to complain about the restaurant: the restaurant turned off the ceiling heaters to drive away the customers. One of the PIs (I think it was LC, not sure after a mojitos and a martini) had a great comment on it," They are not used to having customers".



P.S. A couple of other small things.

You hardly saw any local folks downtown after working-hour, yet there is a BIG AMC theater.

There are NO convenience store within walking distance to get cheap bottled water but like 20 Starbucks in the area. (When you drug yourself enough, you don't feel dehydrated?!)

Sun lost (not much) to Lakers on Wednesday. Never a fan of Sun, but never even like Lakers at all. Sun really needs to work on their defense.

Last year the same conference was in downtown Dever, CO and everyone complained a lot. I never thought that I would miss it one day.

Feb 14

A perfect LOL for today.
Check out Jason Shogreen's flickr page for more.

(What am I doing now? Working, Of course.)

1/12

I know this sounds really annoying...

" 1/12 of the Year of 2008 has passed by." :p