Man, what a weekend. It was a very memorable weekend and for three entirely different reasons. Let’s go with the bad first.

Oh that effervescent smell of manure and garlic. I’m talking about the Gilroy Garlic Festival. It’s a flea market looking festival that happens every year and my wife, for some reason unknown to man, decided that this year, we must go and take the kids. Even though I shouldn’t have, I said yes. Usually during the middle of the week, my wife will have these outrageous weekend plans, and when the weekend comes, she decides to clean the house and we just spend quiet weekends at home. This is how I figured it would be. But no, on Saturday morning, she decides that it is a must that we go. I act like I didn’t remember her telling me during the week that we would go, but that didn’t faze her. We were going and we were going to have fun. Now, I don’t mean this as a slap in the face against the people of Gilroy, but my idea of fun didn’t include hobnobbing with a bunch of drunk red asses. What is a red ass? Usually someone who mixes alcohol and sun and gets testy. On Saturday, I had my share of red asses.

It took us an hour and a half to get to Gilroy that morning. And we even took shortcuts. The kids were fussy, I had finished reading Dave Meltzer so I was fussy, and the wife had enough of the traffic. I fell asleep at one point and she slapped me because the baby hadn’t. So we finally get in the parking lot and we are parking on hay. My feelings about Gilroy were right on point once I saw the hay.

Read More

I have been asked many times why I like watching and following professional wrestling. You know, the WWF. It’s really hard to answer because if the person doesn’t really understand the aspect of professional wrestling and just thinks it’s a bunch of fake guys in the ring hugging each other, they wouldn’t understand the reasoning either. So I was thinking about how I could put it in laymen terms.

Everyone has some sort of favorite television show. Let’s take for instance Beverly Hills, 90210. Now Beverly Hills, 90210 would run from every August to April let’s say. And in that time, you would get one new episode a week for the 7 months. That would make 28 episodes a year. And in those 28 episodes, two would specials, not really continuing story line episodes. You know what I’m talking about. The 100th episode special with clips from every year. Basically you’d get 26 fresh episodes of new material, story lines, drama, who’s sleeping with who, backstabbings, and everything else that comes with Beverly Hills 90210.

Read More

After reminiscing about past days with a friend from what I’d like to call The Blockbuster Years, and also talking to my boy Albert, I came to a realization that I have made the right decisions thus far in my life.

Big Willie (Wilfredo) reminded me of how things were at The Block as Georgie used to call it. He reminded me of the nasty chick who used to chase me around that place. And I remembered when her nasty friend suggested that Eddy and I go to a hotel with them. Until I reminded them that they were too young, they really thought it was going to happen. I told Big Willie that we should have a Blockbuster reunion, but half the people will probably be unreachable. Maybe Eddy, Albert, Anthony, and I will just go to Vegas to hang with Big Will.

Albert told me that he feels as if he’s not going places. He says that his goal while he was young was to make films. And now, he’s not doing it. He was telling me that he wants to go back to film school and reach his goals. Once he said he was going to sell his car, I knew he was not joking. Back in the day when we were at The Block Albert and I kidded that we should go to Hollywood and do odd jobs while we just wrote scripts and we wanted to become the Asian Ben and Matt. But that was also before I became married and had children. Of course, as many dreams, it never materialized, but now, Albert is trying to make it happen. I commend him for that because he’s shooting for the stars. He’s working at a great company, with great stock, where he is making more money than ever, but he’s still unhappy. He could rest on his laurels and do fine, but his happiness is more important. Read More

Man, yesterday was a tough day. I play baseball on Sundays in the spring and summer. And while the fire still burns in me to compete every weekend, I’m coaching now, so I have to be able to channel my energy and be able to turn that fire on and off. That’s part of the reason why I don’t play defense as much as I used to. My favorite part of the baseball used to be defense. I have never been fleet of foot in my life, so I always had to be a step ahead of the game to succeed. So I used to dig defense because I could use my head to get ahead. I could do things like deke the runner into thinking the ball was hit on the ground when it was really hit in the air and then we could turn an easy double play as the runner (who was supposed to go back to the bag if the ball was caught in the air) would be caught off the bag. Stuff like that used to get my engine going. Now it’s being in control. Maybe it’s because I’m not in control at my own house.  Maybe it’s because I’ve forever been the employee and never the employer. Maybe it’s because I like being held responsible and don’t really trust anyone else to get things right. But for some reason or another, being in control on the baseball field all of a sudden is how it has to be for me. But being coach, means being able to place 25 year old men in the right spots while trying to get them to play together and keeping them from tearing each other’s head off in the dugout. Thus far, 15 games into our season, I have luckily had few problems. But low and behold, yesterday really tested my patience as a coach and my temperament as a man.

It was the second game of a double header in which we lost the first game 9-6 to a team that is sub par in talent as well as in attitude. They are the type of team I love beating because they don’t have players that respect the game. They disrespect the game, the umpires, and the field that they play on. The type of team that will curse at each other on the field and joke on each other in the dugout. I consider it embarrassing for teams like that to beat a team that I put on the field. I want my teams to respect the other team. They must respect the game that has been played for three centuries in a row and treat the field that they walk on like sacred ground. Now if we could only play as well as we act.

Read More

If you ever read anything from the Evil Fluffer himself, read his latest post from this Saturday. It’s a touching story about the relationship between he and his niece. Now she is moving away and he talks about how her trip away is affecting his life.

You’re heard the term that everything is cyclical. I’ve heard that said many times and now, I’m living it.

I was working at VeriSign.com in mid 1998. I was just doing temp work like filing (they still use my great filing system as well as my labels) and then learned how to do other things such as charge credit cards and do collections. By the time I left in January of 2000, I was a full on member of the accounting/finance team.

In January of 2000, I interviewed for a position as a customer service rep for a company called Epinions.com. I had actually used their service and was a member of their community before I interviewed. I got the job, but was told, that it was no average customer service job. Damn they were so right. In no time I went from answering general e-mail questions to running the redemption process. Since Epinions pays their users to write product reviews, someone had to run the process in which they would actually get paid. That was me. Damn, who would’ve thought that customer service consisted of logging all the member redemptions and processing them in Unix and then ftp’ing that data to the check processing center. And soon there after, I was in charge of the advisor community and tended to them. And in April of 2001, I decided that I had enough of the drive from San Jose to Brisbane (1 hour) and called it quits. But man, that was the best job ever. It was the best job because of the freedom we had as customer service reps (we were called community care) and because it was damn near like playing on a team. I would ask Albert what the deal was with a particular bug on the site. Bam, he had an answer. I would go to Christal and ask if there was any abuse going on at the time. Bam, she had an answer. If I had any question that couldn’t be resolved by my team, I would hit up Dan or Alexis. Bam, answers. I’ve never been somewhere where everyone worked so well together. I miss those days.

Anyway, the moral to this story is that low and behold, I’m back at VeriSign. After a three month hiatus watching the kids, doing personal stuff, taking two classes at West Valley, and watching as many Beverly Hills 90210 re-runs as humanly possible (even watching re-runs of re-runs in case I missed anything the first and second time) it was time to go back to work. I had two different interviews at VeriSign before going right back to accounting/finance. My first interview was with someone who shall remain nameless because I don’t want to pollute my site. And the second interview for a spot on the Technical Support team where my boy Albert is. To read his musings, click here. That interview was great. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I do believe that if they receive more reqs for their team, I may be on it someday. But until then, I’m happy in finance. Yah, there’s not too much problem solving like at Epinions. It’s more or less calling customers who don’t want to pay for their product when we’ve already given it to them. So you get to deal with some shady people. But as of right now, I consider it home.

Damn cyclical.

Quick update. I guess my memory failed me. As I was telling my wife of my writings yesterday, she basically told me that my memory sucks. If you read my latest post, I told the story of the origin of my two son’s first names. My wife told me that I had given my uncle the poem about his son the same Christmas that my son Brian was already born. So I had already asked Gary if I could name my son after Brian before I wrote the poem, since my Brian was already on his way. Basically, it was a memory screw up. I can’t even blame being senile.

I was reminded twice in the past week why I gave my kids the names they have. On Saturday, Carol and I took the boys to a birthday party for my cousin’s son. I don’t really have much of a relationship with my cousin Aaron, let alone most of my father’s side of the family save for his two sisters Helen and Carol and their kids and grand kids. There is so much family that I don’t really remember their names that well. That’s awful of me, but my sister and I grew up seeing them only twice a year. So at the party, my dad was touting my son Jonathan (JJ for short) as the new Johnny. The old Johnny was my dad’s brother who passed away in a car accident when my dad was young. My dad even gave himself the middle name of John (he was never given one) in honor of his big brother. My dad used to tell me stories of his brother being so cool. Cooler than James Dean and he said his brother was Elvis before Elvis.

So as my dad said this to his cousin, it really dawned on me that I’m glad that Carol and I gave our children meaningful names. Jonathan was named more so because Carol liked the name, than for the uncle that I was never able to meet, but there’s a reason why I call him Johnny. The reason being that I believe family names need life long after the person who went by that name passes. To me, my father’s brother wasn’t an important part of my life because I never met him. But to my dad, he meant everything. Think about losing your idol as a young kid. Think about losing the one person you looked up to and that one person you knew would protect you for your entire life. To him, me calling my son Johnny means everything.

Read More