I’m a Jinius

So in an effort to be more social I decided to sign up for Nerve.com’s dating service.

Online socializing is still socializing, right?

After about twenty minutes of filling out all these tedious questions about my eye and hair color (why do they need to know this? won’t they see my photo?) and things you like and dislike (I wrote that I like steak and beer), I viewed my final profile and noticed that under gender, I was listed as a man.

So I tried editing my gender but Nerve.com requires that you contact Customer Service in order to update your gender.

But I wasn’t updating my gender like it was some facebook status–I was just fixing a mistake that the computer system made in the first place!

So I deleted the account and started over and AGAIN my profile was listed as a MAN. Do you think a man would use the screen name petite_lala????

I emailed Nerve’s customer service and the dude who emailed me back told me that in order to update my gender I had to make a payment or something and then I realized that online socializing takes more effort than socializing with real people so I retired my lofty ambitions of going back to the online dating world.

Plus, I am not paying money just so I can tell the world that I’M NOT A MAN.

In random news, I was thinking about a weird childhood memory this morning. I guess sitting at a cubicle and staring at a computer screen will create a state of hypnosis and evoke random thoughts from your memory’s periphery.

And I remembered the first time I went to sleep away camp. I was in the fifth grade. And I went balls to the wall during the camp meals because it was like the first time I got away from my mom’s korean food and could indulge in all this American gastronomic glory like beefaroni.

God I loved beefaroni.

Anyway, so my endless consumption of starch and curious meat products ultimately led to the clogging of my digestive system and I was severely constipated. I don’t think I went to the bathroom for like three days straight. I couldn’t really participate in any of the camp’s physical activities because having three days worth of beefaroni in your system really limits your athletic prowess. I literally felt like I had a stack of bricks in my stomach.

So I went to the camp infirmary.

The nurse asked me what was wrong.

Except at the time, my limited fifth grade mind did not know the medical term for being clogged up. My mind was racing. My brain was like a rolodex, just flipping through vocab words, trying to figure out what to say to this nurse. How could I explain my ailment in a mature and succinct way to this nurse–this little old white lady???

So I just resorted to using a word from my Miami patois. A word that all the young Latin kids in school used to discuss their bowels.

I said:

I can’t ca-ca.

Did you guys hear about the man in Japan who drove around in his car spitting coffee at Japanese school girls?

The spitter, who was nicknamed “Coffee Bukake Man” [コーヒーぶっかけ男] by locals, had carried out 5 attacks since the end of October. All of his victims were junior high school or high school girls wearing their uniforms, and all of the attacks involved spitting coffee onto their faces from his car window. His final attack took place on December 7th, when a 16-year-old schoolgirl he spit on was able to come to her senses quickly enough to spot his license plate number and memorize it. This led to the arrest of 26 year-old Yoshiro Sumiyama, who admitted attacking the girls. Sumiyama told police that he was irritated after having been dumped by a woman and carried out the spitting attacks to relieve some stress. (From Boing Boing)

This reminds me of the time I was waiting for my mom to pick me up in front of school and this guy stopped his car in front of me, opened the door, and started rubbing his twig and berries.

Maybe his girlfriend broke up with him.

Or maybe he was just crazy.

I had my last session with my trainer yesterday. I’m really going to miss him. Especially his inspiring words, unyielding optimism, and overbearing balls.

I think I’ve really learned alot from the training sessions. I was never the type of person that was good at sports–especially organized sports involving catching, hitting, or understanding rules. I once pretended to faint in gym class so that I didn’t have to run the mile. And now, thanks to my trainer, I can run twenty minutes on a treadmill without falling off.

I think the difference between then and now is that my trainer is a great motivator. Whenever I feel like I can not possibly do another pushup– even if my life and unborn children’s lives depended on it– he gives me a pep talk.

Trainer: You’re stronger than you think you are.
Me: No I’m not.
Trainer: I know you can do it. You just have to want it.
Me: What I want is a cheeseburger.
Trainer: How can you say that?
Me: There’s a Wendy’s commercial on tv right now.

He looks over and sure enough there is a commercial for one of those double beef patty cheese burger thingies. Normally I scoff at fast food but at that moment the cheeseburger looks like a piece of meat heaven. My trainer laughs. “You’re funny, ” he says. My trainer is always laughing. Especially when I am trying to lift a 15 pound dumb bell over my head and there are veins popping out of my neck.

If my P.E. teachers were as nice as my trainer then I probably would have made a little more effort instead of forging a sick note from my parents. And it’s not just my teachers who thought I sucked. My classmates and even my bestfriends wouldn’t pick me on their team. Kids in arm slings got picked before me.

I couldn’t even blame my lack of dexterity on being Asian. My younger brother was a star at sports, playing baseball, basketball, and football. I could care less. I just wanted to read my Nancy Drew books. My mother enrolled me in ballet classes so I could develop some coordination. I appreciate the thought, Mom, but doing pirouettes didn’t exactly help me avoid being pummeled to death by thirty balls in dodgeball.

But thanks to my trainer I learned that if you really focus and visualize doing something then you will succeed. You have to train your mind before training your body. This mentality has even transferred into my professional life, motivating me to work on my screenplay and not be afraid to take risks.

So I would totally recommend getting a trainer. Especially if you enjoy long periods of physical pain and humiliation and don’t know whether you want to pass out, puke, or both.

You know how they say if you were never molested as a child then you were an ugly kid?

Well, I think if you were never traumatized as a child then you never turn into a funny adult. (I’m not sure how this hypothesis correlates with the first sentence but there’s a meaning in there somewhere.)

But think about it. The best comedians and comedy writers had harrowing childhoods. Chris Rock got beat up by white kids. Judd Apatow was the last one picked in gym class. Chris Farley was obese. Tina Fey wasn’t good at math.

But thanks to middle school I now have a sense of humor. My first year in middle school was probably the worst experience in my entire life. I had glasses the size of my face. I wore clothes that my relatives sent me from Korea because they were cheaper. So instead of wearing a GUESS shirt I wore GEUSS. Oh, and I was like the only Asian in a school in Miami.

So the hierarchy of cool kids went like this:

White guys with facial hair
White girls who were Jewish
Cuban kids who looked white
Black kids who looked like they would beat up white guys
Learning disabled kids
Kids with fake body parts
Math nerds
Science nerds
Band nerds
Me

I’m not exaggerating when I say I had no friends. Our classes were divided into Advanced and Regular. I was in the advanced classes and most of my friends from elementary school were in Regular. But I wanted so badly to be in Regular. I just wanted to be Regular!

Lunch was the worst part of the day. Imagine three hundred screaming kids in a cafeteria that smelled of cheese and chocolate milk. I sat with this one girl Alice and her friends and one day one of the girls turned to me and said, “Why do you eat lunch with us? No one talks to you.”

So I would go to the library during lunch. I read alot of magazines. Mostly Teen and Seventeen. I was obsessed with the articles titled “How to be popular” or “How to get clear skin”. I also read ALOT of Archie comics and Reader’s Digest–especially the humor section. I also wrote alot of short stories and skits. You could say I used comedy as a coping mechanism. Or a substitute for friends.

Eventually I made some friends. I befriended the one other Asian girl Nguyen Nguyen. She didn’t have many friends either because her first and last name were exactly the same. And she always wore the same white, collared shirt to school. She was gorgeous though. See, only in Miami would a gorgeous Asian girl be ridiculed.

And then through Nguyen Nguyen I met some of the drama nerds. We would even eat lunch together and hangout in Spillout. Spillout was a post-lunch break where all the kids hangout in this outdoor area and watch the black girls get into fights and pull eachother’s weave. It was inspiring.

Around this time our school was holding student government elections. Seventh graders could run for Secretary. I decided I wanted to run. I don’t know what made me think I could possibly win. My only friends were Nguyen Nguyen and the future gay men of America. But I really wanted to run for student government. All the popular kids were in student government. If you were in student government you could do the afternoon announcements and get out of fifth period early. I so wanted that!

I was up against this girl Christie. She was a brown haired, blue eyed cheerleader. I was running against a cheerleader. That is like an honest democrat running against George Bush. There was no way in hell I was going to win.

So I passed out tons of hand painted stickers that said Vote for Me. I enlisted my artsy friend Lisa to make my posters. Because I wasn’t in a real clique I befriended all the outsiders like the black kids who liked to read. Actually, unlike most of the kids at my school, I had a lot of black friends. I befriended the black jocks because I was on the track team and the black dancers because I was in The Flysteppers. Isn’t funny how middle school elections reflect the elections in this country? Don’t ignore the black vote!

Election Day came. I prepared a televised speech. Yes, I had to speak in front of a camera. Votes were tallied at the end of the day and announced over the speakers.

And guess what?

I won. Yes, the nerd beat the cheerleader. You didn’t think I was going to give you a story without a happy ending did you? I don’t know how I won. Or who I must have paid to miscount the votes. But I won.

I still wasn’t popular. I joined the drama department and hungout with theater geeks. But I had friends.

(This post is dedicated to my friends Sabbie and Prom Date and the former nerds of America who are now funny as hell. Actually, Prom Date wasn’t a nerd but he went to my middle school and is funny as hell.)