Tuesday, November 24, 2009

No. 0053 - A Girl Named "NPR"


If NPR (National Public Radio) is a girl, I would ask her to marry me. She is funny. She is smart. She is witty. She always have something interesting to tell me. She cares about things that really matter in the world today, yet she is never too busy to tell me a few random fun facts (picking lock for a sport! who would have thought!? http://www.wbur.org/2009/11/19/locksport).

She introduces me to new music all the time. And we are not talking about playing the same pop song every three hours like most others but instead excerpt of songs from rising stars from all sorts of genre (she introduced me to Zee Avi, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a46VZ-dE8-4).

She is unbiased on most political views, but yet she is not a push over even in front of the most formidable figure. She examines topics from all angles allowing me the freedom to process the information in which ever manner I wish.

She asks intelligent questions which often times does a good job of stirring up my brain juices, while at the same time also asks questions that make me feel.

She likes to talk science on Fridays (Science Friday) which combines two of my all time favorite things together: Science and Fridays.

She knows how to fix cars on weekends (Car Talk) but then right after that, she'll jump right into an engaging discussion of making fun of current events (Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me), which is also one of my favorite things to do and that is poking fun at whatever.

Though she does repeat herself during the night time (in some places Latin music) but I don't mind.

She is way popular, with lots of people always trying to call her. One time I've finally mustered up enough courage to call her to voice an opinion but her line was busy. I was pretty crushed.

And you know this attraction is 100% genuine and not one bit shallow because she doesn't even have a body or a face.

Some of you may say, "wow, Patrick has really lost it this time" or "that last breakup must have really messed him up in the head!" Messed up in the head? Maybe. But one thing I do know from an interest-based analysis standpoint, that if NPR is a girl, I would find her dang attractive.

Disclaimer: Please don't interpret this as "Patrick's Future (Human) Wife Wish List". I'll never post such a thing, even though this would be pretty close. If you follow this blog regularly, you would know that the spirit of this blog is an attempt to approach everything in life analytically. Please don't consider me crazy. Thank you.

Saturday, November 14, 2009

No. 0052 - Vacation Sync


Just a few weeks back, I had some of old college friends visit me from the west coast. In the mean time, I took some vacation to go with them on a road trip to visit another college friend of ours in DC. Needless to say, there were a lot of planning involved but nevertheless, they were good times. Idealistically speaking, I wished some of my other friends would have been able to join us for the reunion tour but because now that we all have graduated and have moved on with our lives, it is getting harder and harder to sync up our PTO to go on a trip together just like the good old days. When we were still in college, syncing holidays are easy because we all went to the same school so we would share holidays. But now that we all work, PTO's can be taken anytime in the year. Unless you plan something out a year in advance, taking vacation as a bunch of friends is nearly impossible. I wish there is some program out there that would simply sync up our holidays, you know, kind of like black out dates. So say you are trying to book a flight for a family reunion, this program would automatically bounce back an error saying "Black out dates! You need to save your PTO and money for the camping trip next month!". Or say you are trying to get marry, have kids and start a family and stuff "Black out dates! Can't get marry until after your road trip to Mexico!" I would imagine a program like this would have only 2 outcomes: (1) all the friends would be able to meet up and have a great time on a vacation together or (2) you would lose a lot of good friends really fast.