Rutgers (Part III)

It's been a while, but here it goes. Junior year…

Same thing everyday
I took Chinese 102 with my friend Victor during my junior year at Rutgers. The class met in the late morning Monday-Thursday, so we had it more or less everyday since neither of us had Friday classes. Every morning one of us would end up waking the other so we could head to class. We usually jumped on an F bus and then walked past a barren plot of soil where we literally watched the grass grow a little more each day. During class our teacher would always ask me the hardest questions which I never knew how to answer. I'd spend the next 5 minutes rifling through my textbook piecing Chinese words together to make a subpar response. It was always a relief to get out of that class, but she was a good teacher and I think she pushed me so I'd learn more.

After class, we would head to the take out line at the dining hall. We always got there ten minutes before they opened so we'd just wait at the front of the line till the clock struck 11:30am. We both got the same thing everyday: one cheeseburger, one chicken patty burger, fries or onion rings, two drinks and sometimes a dessert thing if it wasn't something too gross. Then we would head back to our house in New Brunswick, each fry an egg, put it in our cheeseburger then eat in the living room while watching The Price is Right with Drew Carey. This happened….every…day…for three months. I'm craving a cheeseburger with an egg right now.

Watching Videogames
I didn't play as many games junior year as I did watch people play them. I watched my roommates and friends play Bioshock, the Metal Gear Solid series, Tiger Woods golf and probably a bunch of games I don't remember. I don't know how many hours I spend sitting on the couch just watching people play various games as if it was being broadcasted on HBO. I sat and watched Victor play 18 holes of golf against Tiger Woods. He was up the entire game until he got spanked during the last two holes. Talk about wasting an hour watching my friend lose to a computer in virtual golf. Another time a bunch of us watched a friend play all the way through Portal in one sitting. It's a short game, but still requires 2-3 hours of straight game play to beat.

Portal has references to cake a lot, so we eventually had a craving for cake at around 1-2am. When I say "we" I mean the several people that were watching the completion of Portal in its entirety. So the most natural progression for us to take would be to wander the streets of New Brunswick until we found cake to eat. Turns out there aren't a lot of cake places around or open at 2 in the morning, so we settled for brownie mix. Yes, we made brownies instead and also in a pound cake pan instead of a baking pan. It took forever for the middle to cook and we didn't get to enjoy it till around 4am.

Since we're on the topic of wandering NB late at night due to cravings, my apartment mate randomly asked the question "does anyone want a sugary drink?" at around 2am once. Surprisingly, several other people and myself were just thinking the same thought. So again, we wandered the street of NB late at night due to cravings. This time was more successful however. As you can imagine, sugary drinks are far more common in the late night scene than cake.

You instill fear in the people
My roommate, Mike, and I went out one afternoon to eat or buy videogames. I forget what exactly we were doing but both were common occurrences, so it's probably one or the other. On our way back we were looking for parking on the street as we drove past our house. We saw Victor in the front so instinctively Mike rolled down the window announcing "THIS IS A DRIVE BY!!!" and we proceeded to shoot him with our pretend guns and verbal sounds effects as he played along by running down our driveway to the backdoor.

As we parked in front of the house our neighbor walked up to the window of our car. She began with, "That was really stupid you know!" I was confused at first but realized she must have witnessed our fake drive by episode and was quite upset by our actions. She went on for a couple minutes about how the streets are dangerous because of people like us and a lot of things I didn't really understand. The last thing she said was, "you instill fear in the people!" and she walked off down the street. The worst part was that she only really yelled at. Yeah, I guess she wasn't all wrong, but no one really got hurt except that I was a little traumatized after being chewed out by a total stranger for something my friend started.

Dude, what happened to your car?
Who would text me at 7am on a Sunday? Answer: my apartment mate Tim on his way to get a Wii. The text read "Dude, what happened to your car?" This obviously can't be a good thing so I went outside to check it out. I parked my car right in front of the house the night before but when I opened the door it was no where to be seen. Did someone steal my car? Did I forget to put the parking brake on and it rolled away on its own? Well I found it two dozen or so yards down the street with the front end completely demolished. The first thought in my mind was a mixture of "That's not right…I didn't park there and it didn't look like that last night…" and straight up "WTF!?!?!?"

I called the cops and they determined that a drunk driver probably drifted onto the wrong side of the road and smashed my car head on. The impact was so bad it slid back and hit Victor's car, which previously was parked far enough to fit two cars between us. There was a trail of leaking antifreeze from the drunk driver's car which the cops followed, but never found the culprits. I also found a Nissan emblem resting under the hood and on top of the engine. My car was a Toyota. My parents came to check it out soon after and then took me to Ihop for a nice breakfast. Later that night Victor and I were pretty sad, my car was totaled and Victor's took some decent damage as well, so a couple of us went to Target to do make some impulsive purchases. Overall, it was a pretty crappy experience, but it's one of those things you find entertaining well afterwards.

Rutgers (Part II)

Sophomore year...

SC, Madden '07 and the Nintendo Wii

Starcraft was a big hit sophomore year among my roommates and myself. Mike, Joe and my other suitemate Josh along with myself would play almost on a nightly basis. We played use map settings maps for you Starcraft people out there. We played a map designed for six players but we believed we could beat it with four. We usually played in Joe and my room so we didn't have to move so many computers around, but one day we decided to all play in the living room. We got ourselves all setup and we started the game. We were on the last level and we were in a good state to finish. It was our best run yet, but before we could finish the game my laptop ran out of battery. I plugged in my external hard drive which is where my SC was installed for some reason but I didn't plug in my laptop and since SC takes up the whole screen I didn't see the low battery warning. In short, the game froze waiting for me, but I couldn't rejoin. They tried to finish without me, but we lost. We never played Starcraft together since that night. I singlehandedly destroyed our hopes to finish that map, along with our nightly ritual.

This was also the same year we were proud to welcome the brand new Nintendo Wii to our suite. Mike waited in front of Best Buy for hours on the bitterly cold November night before the release of the much anticipated new gaming console. The morning he came home with his new baby his roommate kicked it off the stand and it fell over onto ground. Not soon after that our friend, Dan, was holding the Wiimote ready to bowl his turn in WiiSports when we noticed he didn't have the ever so important strap around his wrist. We told him to put the strap on but he responded with "Don't worry guys, I got this." Immediately after he said this he swung with all his might forcing the Wiimote out of his grip and flew directly upwards smashing into the concrete ceiling of the suite, then plummeted back downwards to be smash again into the ground. Luckily last memory of the Wii that year wasn't quite as destructive. I woke up one morning to find Newman, one of our friends from upstairs, lying on the couch playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I never saw him leave that couch for a couple days if I recall correctly. He shifted positions once in a while but never really witnessed him getting up. I woke up in the morning and there he was on the couch already hard at work. I went about my day going to the dining hall, classes and whatever else I usually did but every time I came back to my suite there was Newman lying on the couch playing Zelda. At the end of the day I would brush my teeth and say goodnight to Newman on the couch with Wiimote at the ready as I passed him to get to my room. He stopped after a couple days and ended up never finishing the game. What a shame, but I guess it was a pretty good run.

Madden '07 was a huge hit at that time as well. All the suite guys in our year had it by one means or another. I remember Joe's computer was so slow the only way he could play was to turn the graphics down to the lowest setting so the football players looked like Lego people. My most memorable moment was in our Earth Systems class. There was a bunch of us and we would all have our laptop so we can play Madden in the lecture hall filled with 200+ students. Victor turned his laptop on and it made the Windows startup noise, so we told him to make sure he muted his laptop before he started up Madden. By the time he launched Madden, class had already started and the room was dead silent. At this time Victor's computer said on maximum volume "EA Sports, it's in the game!". While trying to hold in my hysterical laughter I told Victor to plug in his earbuds into the headphone jack before the main menu popped and the theme music started playing. He made it in time, but I'm pretty sure everyone in the lecture hall heard the EA Sports' tagline except for our professor for some reason. It's a classic story but Victor usually leaves the room before anyone starts its retelling

UFC Fight Night
The first couple weeks of Sophomore year was probably the most violent of all my time in college. My roommate was Joseph Wong and Michael Chan lived two doors down in the same suite. Both of them were big UFC and WE fans and every night Mike thought it would be a good idea to wrestle with Joe while he was quietly trying to study. Joe was always the studious one and Mike was always the instigator. One day, Mike accidental left his phone in our room, so Joe hid it and demanded a ransom. The ransom was that Mike could never wrestle with him again, but Mike would rather just get a new phone than do that. They ended up negotiating the truce period to be three weeks if I recall correctly. There was a lot of anticipation for the day the truce was to be lifted. Mike made a Facebook event to the "Mike Chan vs. Joe Wong UFC Match" in our living room. We made UFC posters with the silhouettes of their two faces staring each other down. There were probably 15-20 people that showed up that night to watch. We cleared the furniture out of the living room and people lined the walls holding couch cushions so the two fighters wouldn't smash into the cinder block walls. If you don't know Joe, he's a quiet guy. He doesn't like getting a lot of attention but everyone loved him, and our underground UFC fight night was his first exposure to Joe Wong famedom. One of our female friends walk around the room with a poster board over her head that read "Mike 'The Man' Chan" as Mike entered the room and she did likewise with a poster board reading "Joseph 'King Kong' Wong" as Joe enter the room. I don't really remember the match very well. All I remember was the finishing blow. Pretty much Joe held Mike's head and kneed him hard in the face. Joe released Mike as he stumbled back and fell to the ground where Joe quickly grappled him and got him into a choke-hold. Mike tapped out and the match was over. After it was all over Joe went into our room and slammed the door shut. I've never seen him that upset before and hopefully never will again. I was scared he was going to strangle me in my sleep because I helped Mike plan the event. If you've never experienced it, living in fear sucks. We ended up making apologies and now we laugh about the whole thing. "Mike Chan vs. Joe Wong", the fight of a lifetime that I'll never forget.

Rutgers (Part I)

I originally started this blog a couple weeks ago 30 minutes before my second to last exam as an undergraduate at Rutgers University. I decided to start a new five part series, one for each year, about some of my favorite memories at the state university of New Jersey. I hope you enjoy it.

Freshman year...

Taco Night
Mondays at the Busch dining hall was taco night. It was the only thing to look forward to on that first day back to class ever week. I always made myself a taco salad because I was always too lazy to make real tacos. My choice in beverages, which was standard at every meal, was at least two glasses of chocolate milk and at least two glasses of cranberry juice. I am salivating as I type. One taco night, after eating at the dining hall my friend Benedict and I were walking back to our dorm through a snow covered parking lot. I suddenly felt something welling up inside me. I stopped and threw up into the snow in the middle of an empty parking spot. I'm guessing it was all my taco night items of consumption turned scarlet red from the cranberry juice. All I did was laugh and walk back to the dorm. Soon after that I was feeling hungry again since I just lost my dinner and I thought about going back to the dining hall to get some more tacos, chocolate milk and cranberry juice.

All-nighter

I love and require a lot of sleep every night, so it's not often one can find me lacking it. Many college students can be found night after night with little to no sleep because they're study for a big exam the next day or working on a project that's due in a couple hours. I've only experienced one all night and here is my story. A bunch of my friends and myself were just hanging out and talking till around 5-6am. One of my friends, Bond, decided to just stay up till his class at 8am since by then sleeping would be almost pointless. The most logical thing for all of us to do at this point was to stay up with him. At 7am, we headed to the dining hall for a rare eating of breakfast. I love breakfast, but I love sleep more so I don't eat it that often. Afterward, we watched a chain of Saved by the Bell episodes until one-by-one we left for our class or fell asleep from exhaustion. I remember coming back from class feeling like a zombie and walking past my friend's rooms to find them out cold. I proceeded to my own room where I checked out for the rest of the afternoon. I never pulled an all-nighter again, but I have to say the one time I did pull one was a memorable one. I hadn't watched Saved by the Bell in years and I didn't study one bit either, which is fun all by itself.

The lockpick
I don't know why, but myself and a few friends got ourselves some really simple lockpicks during our freshman year. They had many applicable uses but most importantly we used them to open people's dorm rooms when they've locked themselves out. My friend, Amanda, lost her key somewhere between our dorm and the gym. She was determined to find the key and not have to pay the unreasonable fee to re-key her room door. Until then, she asked to use my lockpick as her "key" so she can at least get in her room. Eventually she became a pro at opening her door with the pick. Usually it takes me a couple minutes to get it right and get the cylinder to turn, but she was so good she could have her door open in seconds. I expected her to never find her key and end up having to pay for a re-keying at the end of the year, but about a month after she lost her key someone found it and turned it into the university housing. She got her key back, returned my lockpick and never paid a cent. The determination to not pay fees at its finest.

It's Story Time (Part V)

This is the fifth and final part of my five part series about story telling!

Why I love VIDEOGAMES...
My early videogame experiences were from the original Nintendo, but only consisted of duck hunt, track and field (with the pre-DDR pads) and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I couldn't get past the first two levels of TMNT because I was too young to try and get good enough to not die at an unreasonable fast rate. Videogames have come a long way since then. Many years after my Nintendo days, my sister and I decided to buy a new gaming console, debating between the original Playstation and the Nintendo 64. Everyone was buying the N64, so we decided to travel down the road less traveled and buy the PSX. This is when a new chapter in my life of story telling began and it consisted of Cloud Strife and his battle with Shinra in Final Fantasy VII.

I am a pretty big Final Fantasy fan, so my first little rant is just going to be about the series and what I love about it. If you've never played a Final Fantasy before it's slow and tedious, but the story line is usually absolutely fantastic (pun totally intended). More so for FFVII and onward the graphics have been absolutely astounding for the time period. I recently got Final Fantasy XIII and I just get blown away every time I play. There's also a lot of character development. The story usually brings players through the past of each of the playable characters and their stories. Bringing all those small stories together on top of the main story, which is usually very intriguing by itself, creates an experience of a life time. (I'm not going to lie, I didn't play FFXI or FFXII. They were kind of weird and mediocre, but FFXIII brings it back to the old school feel a little while adding a whole lot of new and innovative concepts.)

I'm also a big Playstation fan. I don't know what life would be like if my sister and I ended up buying the N64 instead. I eventually bought a PS2 and PS3. My first PS2 was a Japanese model, which meant I could only play Japanese games...yeah I know. Great idea Nathan. I'm also a big Metal Gear Solid fan. I played the first one on PSX and my godbrother bought me a Japanese MGS2 for my Japanese PS2. I still find it amazing that I played and finished the entire game entirely in Japanese. I eventually played it again in English so I can bask in the awesomness of its storyline which I missed the first time around. Later in the series, Metal Gear Solid 4 influenced one of the most impulsive purchases of my entire life.

Two years ago I was at work cruising on Facebook when I saw my friend's profile picture was of Naked Snake from MGS3/4. I realized that MGS4 just came out and I REALLY wanted to play it, but at that time I didn't have a PS3. Solution: buy a PS3 and MGS4. Later that day I went straight from work to Target (yay Target!) and bought a PS3 and MGS4. The PS3 was $400 at the time and games are $60 a pop. MGS4 was an AMAZING game if you can appreciate the decade long story, and to this day I absolutely rave about my PS3 and how it ranks as one of the best, and most impulsive, purchases of my entire life.

Back to story telling. There are a lot of different kinds of games. The good story games are usually open/closed world role playing games and certain first/third person shooters. Playing as a character in a videogame world gives you a sense of attachment. YOU are walking through the cities and towns in an virtual world. YOU decide how to equip yourself. YOU can even sometimes make decisions that shape your virtual world and can alter the storyline for better or worse. Maybe you don't exactly get to create your own world in your head, but it's still a great story telling medium where you can get attached to characters and delve into a world apart from our own.

If you hate movies, TV shows, radio and books you probably have a short attention span and would hopefully find videogaming a little more entertaining since they're interactive and can present a great story in the process. If you don't already play videogames, I believe there is at least one game out there you can enjoy. Also, if you don't already own a Playstation 3 I would highly suggest getting one. It's a great gaming console as well as the fastest Bluray player you can buy. What's not to like?

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So concludes my five part series on story telling. I hope you enjoyed reading and I hope that I have inspired you to experience story telling whether you watch, listen, read or play your way through a good plot. Thanks again, and until next time...

It's Story TIme (Part IV)

This is the fourth part of a five part series about story telling and the mediums in which they are told.

Why I love books...
I said I like the old school feel when listening to talk radio, but books takes that to a whole new level. I never really read anything after I graduated from high school but about a year or so ago I started reading for pleasure again. The first book I read that wasn't for class was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I like somewhat childish novels. I've become a big fan of the Redwall series, yes I'm 22 years old. I also read The Golden Compass which I always thought was a childish book, but it's surprisingly dark and deals with very adult issues.

Anyway, back to story telling. I mentioned it before but I have a pretty creative imagination. I personally don't think there is a better way to paint a picture in my head than reading vivid descriptions in a book. I almost combined this part to this the radio part cause they're similar in how they help me create a landscape or a scene in my mind. Books are generally more descriptive though and sometimes I'll actually stop reading so I can take an extra second to paint that picture. I hate when I watch a movie before reading the book that it's based on because I end up seeing the cast and studio stage from the movie rather than creating my own personal characters and settings. I really like Emma Watson, but she isn't what I imagined Hermione Granger to be like at all.

I'm a slow reader. At least I think I'm a pretty slow reader. I like reading books now because I can read at my own pace. Reading for pleasure is also a one person deal for me. I can probably never do book club stuff and I'm reading stuff for church and talking about it with others every week. I'm having a hard time keeping up cause I can't enjoy reading the books like I would without a deadline. When it comes to my entertainment, whether it's books or whatever, I hate having to wait on other people or have other people wait on me. A lot of times I'd rather just do stuff on my own.

I know a lot of people that don't read for pleasure. In fact I know people that openly say they hate reading. (gasp!) I have to say I used to be one of those people, but now I've fallen deeply in love with reading. If you don't read, pick up an easy book to read and enjoy it. Take your time and give your imagination a whirl.

Side-note...
Going back to the movies based on books. I hate when people don't like movies cause they're not as good as the book. I'm pretty sure there are only a handful of movies, if even that many, that live up to or exceed the awesomeness of the book that it's based on. I personally thought the latest Harry Potter movie, The Half-Blood Prince, was a very well made movie. Yeah, it probably wasn't as good as the book, but who cares. It's not the book, it's the movie. So to all you haters out there, don't judge a movie by its book. (That was clever, I'm so proud of myself for making that up.)