TheLeong.com

Most of my interviews in the business school are in 30-minute blocks.
Reserved spots (“R”) technically have a 30-minute limit on parking in them.
Coincidence? I think not.

The other day I was walking around in the business school, and I saw a group of people that I have seen before. It was the b-school’s tech department or something: about 5 adults (read: faculty/staff members) who were coming back from lunch. They were definitely not professors or anything, but went into the I.T. room if my memory serves me right (and I think it does).

This little cluster of people, however, had to have been the most blatantly dorky group of adults I have seen in a long time. They all were dressed in weird colored slacks with golf shirts, each had about 4 electronic gadgets in various holsters on their belts, and were talking about, well, dorky stuff. It got me thinking: those cliches that people always talk about from high school pretty much never go away. I don’t think when you’re in college you notice them too much; I mean, there are a few definite and broad groups/categories of people (which I will not go into here; that’s a whole other article, and a much longer one at that), but in general you are friends with and interact with a much more varied group of people as a college student.

When you graduate and get a job, however, I have a feeling that they might come back all over again. The b-school tech guys, I mean, were obviously the kinds of folks who throughout middle and high school probably didn’t have a lot of friends, probably liked dorky stuff like Magic cards and Star Trek (haha no offense Frank), never talked to girls, and in general, were losers. Hey, guess what? They still are. Using the business school as the first group of people, I have a feeling that pretty much every company/group/organization of adults (meaning, people out of college) has these cliches. Groups probably interact with each other in much the same way they do in high schools. I’ll bet the tech guys at the b-school don’t talk to a lot of the female young staff (maybe the equivalent of the hot girls). Maybe there are equivalents of the goth kids, the jocks, the artsy kids, the weird crazy ones, and the uppity hippy types. I’m not going to waste my or your time by trying to relate all the groups from high school into old people groups, but I think it’s just interesting to think about I guess. Another brainfart.

And so, days later, I return, still job-less, with a slight cold, but full of clam chowder and lobster. Boston was a lot of fun, although it was colder and rainier than I would have liked. I ended up not sleeping Thursday night in order to pack and drive to Indy for a 5:30AM flight. It wasn’t too bad until it started raining even harder than it had been, which made driving behind anyone impossible, because you’d get sprayed with enough water backwash to make the road invisible. Anyway, somehow I made it alive to the airport, and off to Boston I went.

I spent my first few hours in Boston going to my hotel (in Braintree, should have been called MotherbrainTree), and then going to the nearby mall because somehow I forgot to pack my ties. So I went and bought 2 clearance ties (still nice ones). Made it to the World Trade Center for the Boston Career Fair. Now, I knew this before I went, but it really is something to see and behold: Japanese kids all over the place, all dressed in pretty much the same black suits, looking for jobs and being mega Japanese about it. I watched a video in class about this, called 就職活動 which pretty much means job hunting, but seeing it in real life was kind of funny. I met up with Aki and talked to a few places. Made a fool out of myself at Goldman Sachs trying to somewhat fake that I was interested in finance, which I’m absolutely not. Ah well.

Now to quickly put down the Career Forum and get it out of the way. First, it is geared for Japanese kids who happen to be in America. That was my first big disadvantage, not being Japanese and also not being fluent in the language. Second big boner for the fair was that the big majority of the companies were recruiting for finance-type positions. Also something I’m not. So already going in, my chances were down a lot, but I’m still glad I went. It was a good experience and I did get to see Boston as well. I thought I’d go ahead and get that all out there so that it doesn’t sound like I’m complaining the whole post.

That night, I just went home around 7. Took about an hour to get from the World Trade Center to my hotel with waiting times, etc. I get home and pretty much just passed out. Lack of sleep, extensive walking, and boredom put me out pretty nicely. I woke up around 2 or 3AM pretty hungry, and since Braintree is like a ghetto suburb (read: not a college town), there were no take-out or delivery food places open that late. I was starving. I went down to the lobby, had like 2 cups of coffee, 2 small candy bars from the dish at the front desk, then finally resorted to eating 2 packs of instant oatmeal, with water heated in my rooms coffee maker. It wasn’t good, but it wasn’t bad. I went to sleep again to wake up the next day, a bit later than planned, and finally left the hotel even more later than planned. What caused this tardiness, aside from my usual laziness? Nervousness for the career fair? Practicing my Japanese? Studying corporate literature? No, I was sitting in my room for about an hour watching Bring It On Again, a fine film if I ever saw one. Note that I am joking, but it did have cute girls in skirts, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time.

I get to the career fair finally, and meet up with Seth, then Angela and Sunny, then Paulos and Courtney-something (who I have only met once), then Aki. Also there were some scabes in there. Adam was apparently there earlier, but I missed him. Most of us went to get food, then back to the fair for me. I talked to a bunch of places, pretty much anywhere that didn’t require native Japanese ability. It was decent, but definitely nothing amazing or the like. At the end of the day, Sunny got a sweet offer from Lehman Brothers, so she’s all set. That night, I went and got dinner with Seth, his sister, and Jeremy from Penn State (the legendary Jermbo that german-suplexed a gorilla bear in Nagoya). It sounds very simple, but from the time we decided we should get some food to the time we sat down to eat (eventually at Cheers), about 3 or 4 hours had passed by. We had tried coordinating with like 12 other people, and yeah, that didn’t work. Haha oh well.

Ate dinner, went to the Beantown Pub, and then went home. Luckily (ugh) it was raining, so I got to run to the station in my suit. Good times. The next day, Sunday, I woke up and watched part of another classic movie, Richie Rich. Had enough of the career fair and no one else was going, so I decided to go on an adventure like I do every so often when I’m traveling. The only setback was the cold and wind, which by now I’m pretty sure got me sick. I went to Chinatown, Quincy Market, Boston Crossing, and crossed through the theatre district. Nice, but once again, very cold. Met up with Angela for a bit and got dinner. Lobster for like $12. Hell yes. It was delicious, and I felt like I accomplished something I had to do in Boston.

That was about it; slept a bit Sunday night, got up really early Monday and got back to Indiana. I didn’t get a job, but it was a good weekend anyway. I’m definitely exhausted. In closing, I would like to point out that Boston has the most Dunkin’ Donuts than anywhere else I have ever seen. They definitely outnumbered the Starbucks even. I didn’t actually eat any donuts from there, but I did get a cappucino on Sunday night. Thanks for a good time Boston, and also for the cold. I’d like to go back some time.

PS – on my layover in Philly I got a cheese steak. I love eating 名物。

Wow. It’s late, I’m tired, and thus I just created for the second time in my life a really stupid Japanese joke/pun/gag kind of thing. I was actually trying to figure out what to put as my name/away message kind of thing on MSN Messenger, and out it came. Here it is folks, I openly admit that it is retarded but when you start thinking of this kind of stuff in a foreign language, I guess it’s a good thing…?

ボストンで昼食カツ丼？　いや、就職活動。

Well, if you know Japanese, you probably just snickered. If you don’t, let me try and explain (it makes it worse, I know). So the phrase says “Boston de chuushoku katsudon? Iya, shuushoku katsudou,” which translates to something like “In Boston, pork bowl for lunch? No, job hunting!”

WOW. It’s even worse and doesn’t make sense in English. So yeah, the whole pun is pretty much just because the words for “lunch, pork bowl” and “job hunting” sound the same to me. Now I’m going to go stop speaking Japanese forever.

I think my first one, made after the spring/summer IES Sayonara party was even cornier. I’m not going to bother explaining it, but it was お疲れ、お疲れ、カツカレ～～～. OK now I’m going to bed, I’ve embarrassed myself enough.

It seems like everyone wrote a nice long blog entry last night. I, on the other hand, fell asleep around 1AM-ish laying on my couch watching Frasier on DVD. So that I can stay competitive here in the blogging world, I will also attempt to write a nice long entry, although i can’t promise it will be meaningful at all. You know how they say that some people go to psychiatrists just because they need to talk or vent or something to solve their problems and stress? From that, journals and diaries also became a popular way for people to record their thoughts and ideas. This was like 1800-1970 I think. Nowadays, since Blogs are so popular, people are going to start using them to vent their emotions and things like that. This is not some amazing revolutionary theory that I had, since I’m sure it’s already been talked about a lot. However, I thought of it this morning and decided to write a quick side note about it. Also it doesn’t make sense because I’ve talked to 3 people online since I started writing this paragraph 20 minutes ago.

Down to business. Life has been good, but I’m only going to talk about this for 1 paragraph. Why, you ask? Because the majority of my posts are just boring rants about my life (see above paragraph about the Blog-therapy theory), and no one wants to read that. This past week was extremely busy, but right after my Marketing Strategy exam on Thursday, things seemed a lot better. I booked a hotel for Boston, so next weekend is all set. I’m not going to bother translating my resume into Japanese, mainly because it would be too hard and secondarily because I would make a lot of mistakes. Take my English resume, kudasai.

I think I’ve had this conversation in short form with some of you before, but did you ever wonder what will happen to Facebook in about 4 years? At that point, everyone who signed up in that first year or two will have graduated college. I’m not sure if Facebook makes a LOT of profit from their ads, etc, but will they keep letting people retain their Alumni accounts? After a few years, this is going to get huge and their network is going to quite hefty. Then, since they have this high school Facebook or whatever, are they going to be able to easily transfer their account to college? This is a huge number of people, and I really wonder if Facebook is going to be around forever. On that same note, we are of the 1st generation of people, ever, to use IM (particularly AIM) as a real communication tool. Are we still going to be IMing our friends in 20 years? Kind of funny to think of a 50 year old sitting at home, listening to MP3s, IMing their friends, and checking their Facebook account, but this might happen sometime in the future. I would enjoy retirement if I could do that for a good 20-30 years with no work or obligations at all. Actually that would be ideal.

So this isn’t really a structured blog, but I’m just thinking about how society is going to evolve with the modern applications that the college generation depends on today. I mean, everyone reading this probably has considered IM equal to the telephone at least a few times before. Heck, maybe all the time. Are we going to keep using all this stuff when we’re older and have kids of our own? Are we going to be “brb”-ing because we have to go pick the kids up from school? Are we going to be leaving away messages up that say “getting married”? Actually, people are already doing this, so maybe I answered my own questions. I’m not really asking these questions to be answered; these are more of the pondering-type of rhetorical questions.

Let’s go back to me for a minute. The computer programs/things that I probably use fairly often are: e-mail, AIM, MP3s, Facebook, Blogger, and I’m not including just general internet surfing in this. So if I keep using all these things (not e-mail, because DUH, that’s gonna be here forever) after college, into getting a job, into getting married, and into having kids (wow, scary, I guess I might do this eventually), then retirement, the world will be a weird place. Everyone will be doing the same thing, so maybe we’ll have a society of retired people at nursing homes who chat on IM and say stuff like “LOL my teeth just fell out again, brb.” I realize that there are probably some retired people out there who use IM, but I don’t care about you, you’re just ahead of the times. I think my mom is a good example of someone who isn’t “withit” on stuff like IM. As an example, she has on numerous times signed her IMs like an e-mail, complete with line breaks and “Love, Mom.”

So yeah, I guess I’m going to end it here. If my blog text remains somewhere that I can read it 20 years from now, I will try and comment to my own post. I actually have a feeling that a lot of these technologies will converge with mobile technology (like e-mail and IM are kind of blended in Japanese cell phones), so maybe one day no one will sit at a desktop, but will have some kind of funky portable device that they use all the time. You can IM people across the room or something like that. It’s going to be an interesting future. And yes I realize this post was somewhat of a mindbarf, and I don’t have any idea of what I’m talking about, but I think this whole idea is cool. And yes, I know for a face there are people out there who’s official job is to sit down and try to figure out how this is all gonna roll out. If anyone reads this blog for research, I expect a reference and a copy of the finished work. Note: aleong.com has already been quoted in at least one college paper that I know of, written by a Mr. Brian Blanchard.

When I’m 60 and check my Facebook account, set as an alumni, will I be able to poke Freshmen girls? Because I most definitely will.

I took this from Alicia’s blog. I’ve seen it on other blogs, I guess I’ll join the bandwagon. Also it is easier than writing a real entry. I’ve changed the questions to my liking.

Respond (comment) with your name and…
1. I’ll respond with something random about you.
2. I’ll tell you what song/movie reminds me of you.
3. I’ll try and remember the best quote you’ve ever said.
4. I’ll say something that only makes sense to you and me.
5. I’ll tell you my first/clearest memory of you.
6. I’ll tell you what Pokemon you remind me of.
7. I’ll ask you something that I’ve always wondered about you.