THE WORST JOB

No. I just thought of the worst job ever. You can ask some of the Southeast Asia Team and Peru ’04 Team members; they’ll back me up on this one.

Junia, member on the Peru team, hooked us up with an opportunity to raise funds for missions by working for a few weeks in an auto parts factory in Indiana. So for 2 or 3 weeks that summer, we’d wake up for mandatory morning prayer, pray till 8am, and then drive for 2 hours all the way to Indiana. There, we had to sift through 18,000 drive shafts to manually look for defective parts. There were crates and crates of oily and greasy auto parts that we had to pick up, take the bubble wrap off of, see if the part had a little nick, put a marking on it if it did, and put the good parts back in the crate. There were no seats, no amenities, no redeeming feature about the job itself except it did help us raise hundreds of dollars for missions fund and we bonded with one another. After each day, our backs were sore and our hands greasy. Mind you, this was summer, so we were all sweating profusely. It was nasty.

But that was an eye-opening experience. There were other factory workers there, and they did this kind of manual and back-breaking labor for a living to feed their family. For 2-3 weeks, we were all complaining about how hard and tedious this job was; but for some people, this is their life. And yet, they never complained and always smiled while they did their job. Talk about a lesson on humility.

But yeah…I believe that experience tops it all.

brainstorm session conglommerate

after summoning up some repressed childhood memories, i think i win for the worst job ever.

i'm not talking about my job last year at the radiology lab in the basement of the hospital (with no windows), surrounded by all chinese male computer programmers who would sneer at me because i didn't know anything about computers, and who only spoke mandarin (which i don't understand) (not that they talked to me much anyway), working as a data monkey looking at mammograms and excel files all day. that job really wasn't THAT bad, considering the fact that i never went to work.

i'm talking about my first paid job ever. i was 8 or 9, doing factory work for my uncle.

every year my family would road trip from windsor to (the greater) chicago(land area) and visit my disciplinarian aunt and uncle. (=family+our favourite vacation spot).

my uncle runs an import-export business doing much trading of merchandise between china (=my pet peeve), taiwan, and the u.s.
one incoming shipment that year turned out to be somewhat defective. the merchandise in question was an abundant supply of wire plugs, about the size of a thumbtack. on each of the plugs there was a hole with a diametre of 1 millimetre. unfortunately some of the plugs had holes that were malpositioned. luckily for my uncle, he had a slew of extended family staying with him that week. ...how convenient...
the next thing i knew, my uncles, aunts, cousins, brother and i were inspecting each of the thousands and thousands of individual plugs, keeping the ones with the hole in the correct place, and discarding the ones with the malpositioned hole. next we would count, pack, weigh, and label each portion.
after the first two days i had had enough. so, i took off my good-girl mask (=demasking! and layers...) and revealed the inner youngest-child-brat-demon in me (=bad habit). it was tantrum time and i was going on strike. the union failed to show any support, so i found myself pouting alone in the corner for the next few days until the job was done. of course such behaviour did not get away without consequences. in all fairness, my uncle took a cut out of my pay, meaning that i did not get to go to great america (theme park in illinois...that makes illinois, illinois).

ok. i think i'm gonna go to the great outdoors now and think about movie reviews.

Tomay-toe, tomah-toe, nuclear, nucular…

http://www.umich.edu/NewsE/03_06/words.html

This made me laugh this morning. Did you know that Roosevelt tried to mandate a re-spelling of about 300 words to be used by the Government in their publications so that they would be spelled the way they are pronounced? But, “the Supreme Court claimed that the separation of powers meant that the Executive could not tell the Court how to spell.”

humor

I think it's a safe thing to say that I can't write funny stuff. I like to believe I like witty humor. But I've realized the kind of humor that gets me on the floor laughing are slapstick a la Dumb and Dumber or making fun of others (in a non-threatening way of course, i hope). of the many Simpsons episodes I've seen, one scene that sticks out is the one where Homer can't stop laughing about the film about a man who gets hit in the jewels with a football. twisted as that may be, i still find it ridiculously funny. in our building blocks praise night skit, there's a scene in which CJ is supposed to get hit in the head with a ball. as we were filming the scene, no one thought that the person who threw the ball would throw as hard as he did. CJ got plunked in the face with a ball thrown with all of a man's might, and he fell down without having to act. and i couldn't stop laughing. as i was editing the video, i was laughing so much that i thought i could empathize with women giving birth (not really, but it was painful).

but the ironic thing is, i hate johnny knoxville and jackass stuff. in some ways what johnny knoxville does is like CJ getting nailed in the face or the man who gets hit with a football in the gonads (is that too vulgar?). but something about jackass and that type of show repulses me. do i have schizophrenia? am i selective in my choice of humor at the expense of others' health? i dunno. in the meanwhile, i'm gonna enjoy editing the building blocks praise night video while many of you are on spring break. i get to see CJ get hit in the face over and over again (ahahahaha...sorry bro. ftg, no? hahahaha).

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on another note, have you guys seen this t-shirt? it's quite possibly one of the most ridiculous things i've seen. it's made by a christian clothing company and it basically rips on Brokeback Mountain. i dunno whether to laugh or not. what would happen if someone wore this shirt on campus? hmmm...causes you to wonder, no?

alright, have a great break for you students.

quick study break...

last year i went to the ann arbor comedy club, my first time going to a stand-up show in this kind of lounge-y setting. i got more bang for my buck, coz i got to hear two opening acts and the headliner comic, aaaand i also got to hear many cracks from the 'smart' audience member sitting in the front row. comics sometimes make their acts interactive, like pick members of the audience and poke fun of them. sometimes people play along. other times they're too busy laughing. this dude not only played along, he threw in his own jokes. the comic was a little annoyed at the unsollicited comedy, "oh, do YOU want to come up here and do the show?" sassy!
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once vh1 did a brief interview with weird al yankovic (known for his parody songwriting). it was funny when he started complaining about how fans constantly send him ideas, "you should do a parody of this song, like this, because that would be funny!" then al continued to gripe something like it's apparent that he already can come up with his own ideas for songs, and he doesn't really need that much help to be funny.
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this semester i've been doodling cartoons for our super staff dental assistant at school. (she's great!) they usually consist of personified teeth with faces making dental puns or other 'cute' comments about dentistry. a few days ago we were given a lab assignment in which we had to pick up a couple of old (human) teeth from her office. when it's my time to get my supplies i see her and she goes, "hi amy! i was just talking about you with [the professor]."
i walk in and it turns out that she and my prof had saved the NASTIEST-looking teeth, just for me. then they're both like, "check out these teeth! i've never seen anything so mutated-looking in my life! we thought you could draw a cartoon about them!" i was speechless, so the best response i could come up with was, "wow! thanks, i feel so privileged." then the assistant says, "yeah, you should draw a cartoon with a mutated tooth talking about how mutated it looks. that would be SOOOO funny!" confused, i thank them for the teeth and take off on my merry way.
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hmm...
so, do i take her idea for her next cartoon to appease the audience? (i'm still an amateur at dental humour, maybe i could use some suggestions from someone who's been in the profession a lot longer than me...)
or, should i come up with new material and be like those aforementioned artists, "i don't need your help to be funny!"
why do we like to give artists our input so much? maybe we just want to be entertained? (you should write an article about... THAT would be funny!)