the coming of age, bildungsroman-esque blog of an
American-born, Vietnamese Catholic male

Wednesday, April 13

De-Gentrification of Golf

to weekend hackers,

Don't play golf on weekends, silly people! You can get a noon tee-time during the week for $20 tax included with a cart. That is if you can off work/school during the week to enjoy this new trend in sport/leisurely activity.


(playing here sometime this week)

If you had told me 10 years ago that I'd actually sorta/kinda like golf when I got older, I would've made a pity-filled half-smile/frown I reserved for people I thought were mentally/physically challenged (there were 3 slashes in that last sentence, which is/are a bit much).

But here I am today, hacking away at a stationary white ball like millions of people across the world, doing my figurative part to pay back for years of oppression by the chang** men. And now that I can actually hit the thing with some consistency, it is actually pretty fun. It is honestly a really stupid game made by rich people in developed countries who have no worry about food, clothing or shelter, but when you have no frustration in your life, you have to make some or else you die or cheat on your wife. So wives, be thankful that your husbands' mistress is the fairway wood and not another kind of wood.

But besides thinking every once in awhile that the white golf ball is the head of some colonist a hundred years ago who came and raped Vietnam, it's a plus to see the irritated faces of the my chang when my friends and I invade their little side of paradise. Fourteenth Amendment! You lost the Civil War and the Vietnam War--them's the spoils of victory/defeat.

If it's convenient, we'll replace the divot and perhaps a ball-mark if it's nicely in our path. But we're here to play a cheap, fun round of golf, not pay homage to hundreds of years of upper-class snobbery. We're here to de-gentrify golf, just as rich folks are tearing down projects to build $3 million houses next to run-down shacks on MacGregor near Univ of Houston. Because more than a few people in the 15% tax bracket knew that Rory McIlroy choked horribly at that Master's.

But I guess in a way, the de-gentrification of golf and the gentrification of urban slums are moves toward a more homogeneously heterogeneous middle, a death by entropy. It is not combative or controversial, it is simply natural and eventual.

That is until the robots take over, either those that we create now or those that come back from the future to make us their slaves. And I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords. But we'll assimilate robot parts and be like cyborgs or something, so it will be cool until the aliens come, and then they'll eventually mate with us after all that probing is done so we'll be one species. Punctuated equilibrium to dynamic equilibrium, rinse & repeat ad infinitum.

Yes, I just moved from golf to a broad generalization and trivialization of gentrification to a shout-out to Terminator/Watson, IBM's new supercomputer, and then stuff about aliens and equilibrium.
--

*I don't know the number, just throwing this out there
**white

Tuesday, April 12

Two Overlooked Reasons for Needing a Girl

to the single,

Guys really just want one thing from women, and that--as we all know--is the thoughtful conversational skills that they offer that other dudes simply cannot supply unless horrendously drunk. Oh, and that other thing too.

But besides those two things, there are two very overlooked reasons for needing female companionship, and those are as a supplier of nail polish remover and conservative country fodder.
--

In Texas, we have our vehicle registration sticker on the driver side windshield, generally above the inspection sticker. In the past, it used to be a couple of laminated, heavy stickers put directly on the license plates.*


(not my stickers, not that I'd have any stalkers, but you never know)

And because they're stickers, they come with an innate problem. They're sticky. And they leave that awful sticky residue after you remove them, which is a serious problem for people with mild OCD. Global warming almost compares to this problem since there is still some doubt about its verity (those people likely also doubt evolution), whereas you can clearly see the mildly sticky contamination on your windshield not unlike spots on Monica Lewinsky's wardrobe circa 1996: not blaringly obvious, but they're there if you look.

Usually tape will take care of most stickiness, the stronger the better. Double-sided is the best; duct tape usually makes it worse. Adhere to the sticky spot and quickly tear it off like a Band-Aid. The stickiness should come off eventually. It's best if the sticker was recently removed, but if the residue is old, you're really SOL.

That is unless you have acetone. But if you don't have access to a variety of flammable organic solvents (a la trailer in the country which has a nasty tendency to blow up), the next best thing is nail polish remover. Which if you don't have a female presence in your life, you'd have to buy it at the store which would be awkward since why would a guy need nail polish remover. 'Dude, I swear it's for that residue left on the windshield after you remove those stickers, and not for the black nail polish I use when I'm feeling noir-ish'.

No problem since I'm at home, and Mama's medicine cabinet is stock full of random stuff, including a bottle of nail polish remover probably older than me. Which was a deep violet color, which I wondered was intentional or a product of degradation. But it's not as if solvents expire (and those drugs that have an '09 expiration date are probably still good, but I can't legally recommend you take it, so use your common sense there).

The sticker came off easy enough, and the tape trick took off most of the fresh gunk left behind. But last year, Dad wasn't as OCD about removing the residue, so that was still left on there. After the tape failed, I soaked some napkins with the sweet smelling solvent. *Wipe...

*sigh, [Fine Needle Aspiration..**]

It just pushed the muck around, and it now had brown specks since I used a brown napkin (those ones you get at fast food restaurants).

I've made a huge mistake.

After calming down a bit, I realized some of the glue was now on the napkin. So after another intensive 5 minutes, the rest of it came off the glass. And I stickered the new vehicle registration in place very analytically with the next 5 minutes.

I still can't diagnose myself with OCD since I only spent 35min doing something a sane person would do in 5. Only 30 more minutes of craziness to reach the 1hr daily cutoff.
--

The great thing about road trips to and from my workplace are that I get to see the local fauna and flora, the fauna mostly being the cattle which would end up as steaks across Texas. And the flora from March to May is the state flower, the Texas bluebonnet.


(It resembles those hooded old-fashioned headwear worn by women in the past and they're blue, hence bluebonnet)

And if you permit me this loss of a man-card, bluebonnets are simply magnificent! Maybe it was all the brainwashing in 6th grade Texas Social Studies when they taught us about all the state symbols, like the state bird and tree which I think are the roadrunner and magnolia, respectively***. But the only thing I remembered from all that nonsense (anything that doesn't exist in and of itself and requires documented history is too much information for me. With science, all that was discovered and will be discovered is already present [or omni-present], whereas history could be altered if someone were to wipe out history books and alter human memories) is the bluebonnet, because I think they were the coolest thing when I was growing up.

But they're weeds, and you would hate for them to be in your yard, and you'd mow the heck out of them and litter pesticides that will run off into the Houston Ship Channel. But when they're in the median between two unnatural concrete/asphalt monstrosities criss-crossing this great state of Texas, they're damn beautiful.

And you (and by you, I mean me) just want to stop by the side of the 70mph interstate like some idiot to take a Zyrtec and roll around in those damn weeds, except you're a single guy, and that'd be really weird. And you're in a conservative part of Texas, and they don't take kindly to men who'd make real that awful perversion (in their minds) of Brokeback Montain.

But if you had a girl, that'd be totally cool. You'd just have to nudge and manipulate her, and then say stuff like, 'Really, you want to stop by the side of the road to take a picture for your Facebook profile? Seriously?' when you're absolutely giddy beyond words.

I'm only half joking. But there were quite a few couples last year when I was driving to and from Dallas who stopped in a field of bluebonnets to take pictures. I did want to stop, but it was like Frost's Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening: no reason to stop and many miles to go, both literally and figuratively.
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*I remember because my dad used a chisel to remove it, which I thought was the coolest thing in the world. I was 9.
**F'n A
***wrong and wrong, supposedly it's the mockingbird and pecan according to Google