So just got back from seeing X3 - The Last Stand. Awesome movie. Great effects. Solid story. Go see it.
Tomorrow (er... today) going to Universal Studios with my friends Justin and Heather. Lots of fun.
That's it for now folks! Off to bed...
Signing off,
Cy
So tonight at work was an interesting one. First of all, I worked a full 8 hour shift, which I haven't done in quite a long time. My feet are killing me right now. Second, Veronica, one of our managers had caught a kid stealing sunglasses, called his mom, and told him to never set foot in the store again. That was rad.
The third thing irked me and still irks me to this moment. I was laying out T-shirts on one of the front tables. One of em had a printing of a couple cartoon dogs standing behind a fence. One dog says, "Why must I feel like that", another says "Why must I chase the cat?", and the third says, "It's just the dogg in me!"... Obviously a Snoop Doggy Dogg shirt. Another is a shirt with 'Dr. Dre' printed over a large portrait of himself.
No, it wasn't the shirts that bothered me, but rather a comment one of my coworkers had made. This coworker walked up to me, looked at the Dr. Dre shirt and said, "Since when did we become a 'N*gg*r Store'? I swear, we're getting all this black stuff. They have Demo (another retail store) for that. Pretty soon we'll be selling Fubu."... I was kinda blown away by the comment and didn't really react to it. The coworker went on his way straightening up the area.
Later on in the night, two young black ladies came in the store acting quite hyper and giddy. This same coworker murmurred to me, "I f***in' hate black people."
What is it with people? I'd like to say, what is wrong with our generation, but this isn't a problem that is different between ages. This is something that all people of all generations deal with. Really, why the animosity? Are they really that annoying that you have to generalize an entire race with a stereotype and judge?
I don't understand why people can't be more accepting and kind towards one another. Especially for our generation, we need to set a better standard of acceptance and unity. Building hatred is not a good thing for this world.
*sigh*... My opinions of this certain coworker have definitely changed a bit. I wish that this person gets some sort of revelation in their life that changes their view. But that's wishful thinking.
Cy
Probably one of the coolest websites out there is AskANinja.com. I don't know what it is, but I find it ridiculously hillarious.
Basically it's a guy dressed as a ninja answering questions on video that people email him. Genious, I say.
Here's one video that I found pretty funny.
Cy
If you've been keeping up, you'd know that today I went over to Thousand Oaks to speak at our local HOBY seminar about this blog. The kids are still as energetic as ever. It's always fun. I also got to see some of my old friends from 2003 that were on junior staff with me in 2004. Jeff and Andy... Cool kids.
So anyway, I spoke a little bit about blogging in general. A brief history about where blogging came from... blah blah, etc, etc. I spun it in a way that showed that the youth can get their voices heard through the internet. We're a diverse and opinionated generation. We're tech savvy and the internet is a common tool used by people our age.
When it came time for a brief question and answer session afterwards, I was asked something along the lines of "Do you think blogging promotes the 'emo' lifestyle and is a means for people to draw attention to themselves?". I had to laugh a little because I think that that question was very true and a good generalization of many teenagers today. It does seem that many teens who blog always blog about something sad or depressing and how 'emo' they feel. My response to the ambassador was that while yes, it's a common thing, it's still a stereotype that unfortunately, others of us who are not like that, have to deal with. I don't find blogging as something where I want people to focus on me and check out the cool things I'm doing. If you read some of the past entries, it's normally about plain stuff that I do, what my day was like, etc. I don't blog for other people. My blogging is mainly a hobby for myself.
After the question and answer session, the ambassadors broke out into their groups. The other panelists and I went around answering any questions that the groups might have had. One question I was asked most often was "Why do you think so many people view Myspace.com as a bad thing?"
My response to this is that Myspace.com is a tool. As any other means of communication (IM, telephone, etc) it can be used correctly or abused. It's sad that the older generations get a bad image from Myspace and the people who use it because of what's displayed in the media. The news wont tell you stories about how people have reconnected with old friends or anything like that. The news will tell you about the 16 year old girl who was abducted by an older man posing as an 18 year old guy in high school on Myspace.com. They'll run the dirt, but not the good stuff. And the sad thing is that this isn't just true about Myspace. This is true about most things involving the youth.
One of the other panelists had mentioned a familiar quote about media and news: "If it bleeds it leads." and "Sex Sells". Sadly, because shocking and horrible things get better ratings, noble and praiseworthy things get overlooked.
The internet is a great thing. It is very useful and can be used for so much benefit. Unfortunately, the internet is prone to human fallacy. You can't blame the internet for sexual predators any more than you can blame a car for someone drunk driving, crashing into and killing someone.
If you're reading this and have a blog or a myspace or whatever, be smart. Don't post stuff that contains personal information such as where you live, your phone number, etc. It's just not safe. I know many parents have concerns about their children on myspace. If parents would teach their kids what's okay to put down and what's not, we'd be in a better place.
---
So that was the majority of the day, spending time down in Thousand Oaks. I was suprisingly not very tired considered I worked last night from 9pm to 3am. I woke up at about 9:30am, so i got about 5 hours of sleep. There wasn't any traffic heading down below, but there was a lot on the way up. I'll tell ya. The 405 North to the 5 North exchange is absolutely terrible. On the 14 freeway towards the Antelope Valley, there seemed to be a huge accident southbound, slowing traffic to a dead halt on the southbound side, and also creating a bit of traffic on the northbound side. Hope everyone involved in that was okay.
Anyway, that's mostly it for today. The DaVinci Code came out and I do plan to see it. Should be interesting.
Peace out.
Cy
It's funny that my last post mentioned the end of the world... Cause 30 minutes ago, the end of the world started in Lancaster, California. It was a nice, hot day... now suddenly, we have a huge thunderstorm rolling into town. It's raining and the thunder's loud and the lightning's scary.
Looking out my window, I can view flashes of light strike down from the sky; coursing through the clouds... Even now as I type this, the rain is picking up. Oooh. I just remembered I left the windows open in my car. Be right back.
Wow. It's raining really really hard. Normally storms don't scare me, but just a few moments ago... my room flashed brightly and seconds later, a deep rumble and pop ran through our streets. Soon after, my power went off and car alarms on my street were sounding.
This is really weird.
...okay. Well have a nap. THEN FIRE ZE MISSILES!
Just a quote from a funny flash animation called 'The End of the World'.
Yeah, so work today was pretty interesting. I was originally scheduled to come in at 9:30am, but they called me yesterday asking me to come in at 8am instead. Tom and Ruth, the Regional and District Managers (respectively), were to come in today to do a little check-up on our store. So, they asked me to come in so we could get the store all clean and ready. This involved sweeping, scrubbing, and mopping the store. Tiring work.
When they came in around noon-ish, they looked around a bit and made some nice comments. They left about an hour and a half later. I asked Maria, my manager, if they had said anything good, and she sighed, rolled her eyes and said, "They told me we're 'turning the ship around'". Apparently our store is considered an "Opportunity Store", which means is a nice way of saying that our sales suck and we need to get better.
Last year, the entire company had an increase of around 10% in sales from the previous year. Our store only had an increase of 4%. We were one of the two stores with the lowest gains, so we were picked to be an "Opportunity Store". Maria has to call headquarters every other week or so to update them on everything we're doing. Sounds like the suck.
So I got off work at 2pm and headed home. When I get there, my dad stops me before I head upstairs and tells me he needs my help with something. Not surprising to me though, as he asks me for something almost every other day. But this request is a bit harder than the ones before it. I guess he wants to buy clothing that's on sale here, send it to the Philippines and retail it at a higher cost. I don't know if that's illegal or not, I'm not going to say anything.
Anyway, he wants me to find out how Anchor Blue does their operations. Like the POS (Point-of-Sale) systems that we use, software, how we track inventory, blah, blah, blah. This is honestly something that I am not at all interested in. I have no clue where to start. I've already googled "POS Systems", but all I get are results that I have no clue what in the heck they're talking about. And I'm not about to go to my boss and ask her, "So my dad bought a bunch of stuff on clearance here and wants to sell it overseas for full price. What's the best way to go about doing that?"... You can see the problems with that.
*sigh*... I don't know what to do. My dad is wrapping his head around way to much at once. He's reading real estate books, wheatgrass books, practices piano all day, and is listening to CDs about making money. He owns two houses in the Philippines that he's trying to sell and he's looking for property here in the States. I told him, "You're just doing way too much, dad." He tells me that teaching piano just isn't cutting it and that he has to make the money. He's 50 and only has '5 more years to do it'. I just want the guy to retire already.
A part of me wants to be selfish and not help him at all, but what can I do. He's my dad. He's taken on so many ambitious projects, all of which have never worked. I guess it doesn't help any that mom has a great job and position where she's making a lot of money.
Anyway, that's a lot of honesty for right now. I'm thirsty and dying for a drink. So with that, I leave you. I'll probably post again later tonight.
Cy
Actually, no it wasn't. That was just a lyric from a song by Jack's Mannequin that was in my head.
Today was pretty neat. I got to sleep in til 11am because I had no work. That was cool. Hopped online and jumped on AOL Instant Messenger. Justin and I had talked the previous night about going to get lunch and hanging out before he had to go work. We start conversing on AIM about random things like we always do.
I was pretty hungry so we decided to head to Del Taco for lunch. Before that, I had to hop in the shower. Actually, Justin and I decided that hopping in the shower would be a little dangerous, so I just stepped in the shower instead. I got ready and left for Of the Taco.
Let me tell you guys, even though Del Taco is nothing remotely close to true authentic mexican food, it's darn good and it's darn cheap. Right now Chicken Soft Tacos are going for 79 cents apiece. How do you top that?!? I ordered 5 of em and also an order of chili cheese fries. (aside: if you know me, chili cheese fries is one of my most favorite things in the world) Justin, always having to 'one-up' me, ordered 6 chicken soft tacos.
We headed back to my house to enjoy the delicious snacks. Upon placing the bags of food on the table, I looked in the bag to find, much to my dismay, only FOUR tacos in the bag. Needless to say, I was pretty frazzled. But it was alright. I had my delightful fries to make up for it.
We downed our meals fairly quickly and sat on the couch to watch some good ol' television. One of my favorite shows to watch is "My Super Sweet Sixteen" on MTV. Not because I think that what they're getting is cool and I'm so jealous, but rather because it keeps me humble knowing that there are people out there that are so incredibly spoiled. "BUT DAD, I WANT THAT BMW!!! IT'S SO JUICY!"... wow. just wow.
After that, we headed up to my room to hop on the computer and make some changes to the color scheme of his blog. Check it out. It's neato looking. We also watched some funny videos on YouTube.com. One of which was a hillarious Alex Rodriguez clip...
Wow.
Justin had to leave for work soon after, leaving me to play some World of Warcraft. I haven't played as much of it lately, but I do still play regularly.
Tomorrow I'm due to come into work at 8am. Supposedly our District and Regional Managers are coming in to do some kind of inspection/check-up. So my boss wanted to bring the expert (me) in a little early to clean up some of the dirty work. Haha just kidding. I'm not that great. (But really... I am.)
So that's the blog for the day. I'm still trying to cram in Blogs because I have to speak about it this Friday at a seminar, so I don't want the kids to go home, look up my blog and see absolutely no entries since like April. Not impressive.
Okay, that's it for now. More to come tomorrow (later today).
Cy
Normally I associate the word 'muse' with the image of a beautiful woman with an aura of radiating grace... Justin is neither of those things. But we were talking earlier and he suggested I use this as my title. So, I have.
Anyway, this past week has been reaaalllyy eventful. The first thing that comes to my mind is that one of my managers had to fill out an accident report about me. I had dropped a bottle of cologne on my foot while I was wearing flip flops. It busted up my big toe and left it bruised and bleeding. Pretty cool stuff. My manager said (jokingly I hope) "Well at least the bottle didn't break"... Haha. Good lookin out.
This past week has been pretty crazy/hectic. Between a bunch of work, mother's day, and feeling sick; life has been crazy.
One of the things I've been trying to do lately is to have a really positive outlook on life. Just being more optimistic. I'm content with where I am in life and I think that makes me happy.
So... I don't have much to say right now, mostly because I've forgotten what's happen in the last month.
I'm trying to cram as many blogs in as I can because I'm supposed to talk about it at my local HOBY seminar in Thousand Oaks this friday.
This week is even crazier with work. I work over 30 hours. Today I worked from 6am to 2p. We're doing visual changes, price corrections, and inventory this week. Not fun.
Anyway, drop me a holler when you can.
Cy
