If You Want Pocket Money

so if you know me, i can be pretty persistent if i choose to be. a classic example of it: i took the time to peel and eat a whole grapefruit literally every morning for a good year. that's 365 days and 365 grapefruits entering my body every morning. i have to say i discovered an area near the palm of my thumb, a hidden muscle that allows me to peel even the thickest, most stubborn skin of a grapefruit. another example: if i choose to do some workout and get a pretty fixed schedule going, i can't afford to disrupt the flow. in another words, if i run every monday, wednesday, friday... even if i am sick or have three exams the next day, i will still go out of my way to make sure i get that workout in my schedule. not that i don't like changes, but when i get into a routine of doing things, i just can't let myself stop. maybe it's a minor form of OCD?

anyways, i realized recently how this need of persistence is exemplified in me once again. about two years ago, i found several sites that allow me to earn some money by simply clicking online advertisements that arrive in your email. and by earning money, i mean 2 cents per ad! and you only get to "cash in" your earnings only when it reaches a total of USD $25 (you do the math of how many clicking of ads that amount to) and on average you get about 2-3 of these email advertisements everyday (now calculate how long it will take to reach that $25). i assume if you're a normal person, you will find this a complete waste of time and totally not worth clicking every spam-like advertisements just to earn yourselves 2 cents because i totally agree. but ever since i signed up to do it, i haven't been able to stop and it's been two years since then. but my persistence have proved to pay off. a few days ago i received an email that i have successfully reached the $25 goal and that a check is coming on its way. and i signed up for three of these similar types of programs, which means i earned about $80 in total. i've always had an innate inclination for doing these type of tedious tasks and i almost feel like it's a disease... but it has allowed me to earn some pocket money (although the opportunity costs of clicking these ads is much higher than the benefits that result). 

but if there's anyone out there that totally understand my strange obsession, you can start earning your own little pocket money too. just a warning, it does require a lot of patience and persistence. but if you're up for the challenge, here are several links that help you earn some $:

http://hits4pay.com/members/index.cgi?nishio

http://dealsncash.com/members/index.cgi?nishio

http://www.inboxdollars.com/?r=ref4417011

enjoy! (not)

Copyright Infringement

this actually happened a few weeks ago but i thought i would write about it before i forget that i officially did something illegal in my life. so one day, i got a notice from my university stating that i was guilty of copyright infringement, a form of US law violation. It was like reading my business law book (which by the way cost me like 200 bucks)... a good amount of technical terms with weird code-like numbers all jam-packed into one long page. in the end, i think it was simply telling me not to download anymore. i don't see why they just couldn't say that... so much easier to understand. 


anyways, the funniest part was that in between all this formal shenanigans and law jargons, it told me that i had illegally downloaded a song called "moving mountains" by usher feat. timbaland. it made me laugh because it was such a formal letter and that just destroyed the whole seriousness of it. it's as if i'm at court, everyone's dressed up properly and the judges are reading out the facts in all seriousness... until they mention "we have found you guilty for downloading... moving mountains by usher feat. timbaland!" and the actual song goes on and it's like a party in the courthouse. anyways it's funny because despite how specific they were about what file I illegally downloaded, that song did not exist anywhere in my computer. how ironic, because 90% of my songs are actually guilty of being downloaded and yet they had to pick ONE song that i didn't even own or remember downloading. i mean seriously, how does the song even go?  


because i can't afford to be mistaken for downloading something i didn't, i made a sacrifice and erased limewire from my computer and swore by the bible that i would never download again because i had to get the university to unblock me from the lehigh network. i'm a little sad though... my ipod will never be up to date and i won't be able to download my recently addicted song by train :( i suppose i should be thankful at the least that i didn't have to pay a fine... lesson learned.

V-day

valentines has always been a girl-oriented day for me. as far as i could remember, i only gave valentine cards to my girl friends, not so much the boys. it probably didn't help that my class had only 40 people and 75% were made up of girls. my high school made valentine grams every year as a way for the senior class to raise funds, and it was a trend to have these cards delivered to your close friends, if not your dear loved ones. for the couples, the boys had the option to give the girl a flower and if i remember correctly, a song to dedicate performed by our talented boy singers in front of everyone. i truly enjoyed being the spectator of this, but never would i have liked it if that happened to me.

so the day would end, i would go home, re-read what my friends wrote in my valentine grams and put it up on my wall just because back in middle/high school you posted everything you could on your wall. plus the illustrations on these v-grams were pretty cute and comical. my mom's friend walked by as i was pinning these up and she made a comment about how all these boys were after me. but when i mentioned that these were all from girls, she looked at me funny, probably worried about my sexual orientation all of a sudden. and of course i just had to add the fact that i wrote to them too. probably shouldn't have said that because at that point, she just walked away.

anyways, even a worldwide common holiday like valentines day come in cultural differences. back in japan, it's the girl's responsibility to send something to the guys. reverse of how things are here in the states and probably most western countries. then on march 14th, also known as "white day," the guys return something back to the girls. korea follows this same pattern except they have an additional tradition called "black day" on april 14th. a day especially made for the single people who didn't receive anything on both valentines day and white day to mourn their single life by eating this black noodle called "jajangmyeon." pathetically sad but i don't know, i probably would go in and eat it anyways even if i wasn't single.

valentines is overrated. it's purely for the economy and to make people spend money. nevertheless, i'm happy to say that i'm blessed to have my boyfriend, despite the distance, he has been patient with me. while he studies hard in med school, i'll be spending valentines day having hot pot with my friends here :P

Dr. Bob

so i have a pretty interesting class. i've never had a class like this and i probably never will. it's for my psychology minor and it's called "social psychology for small groups." as the name suggests, it's about observing the group as a whole and how we are as an individual within our own assigned groups. so i started this class like 4 weeks ago? and i think i've only had 3 real classes so far. professor rosenwein, aka dr. bob (don't ask me why), is a particular professor i must say. he comes to class at least 15 minutes late and 4 out of the 8 classes we had so far, he didn't even show up. the first class he actually did show up, we ended up doing a childish hula-hoop activity where we all linked hands to pass the hula-hoop around everyone. and after a couple trials, he claimed that he needed to meet the dean and left. sure it was fun, but really? did i (correction: my parents) just pay $40K tuition to do this?
this is the just the beginning though you see. just a week ago, he didn't show up once again. and everyone was patiently waiting for his arrival, giving him at least another 5 minutes cause we were nice enough to wait 10 minutes into class. but nope, never showed up... only to come back home with this email in my inbox:


Dear puzzled group dynamics types, 


the course has been going on long enough for you to have developed expectations for members of your team, other members in the class, and for me. I deliberately didn't show up today to give us some case study materials to work with about the phenomena of expectations, which I think are key to understand how groups work. I figured everyone else would show up because I sent out my message this weekend about attendance. Let's start on Thursday with some consideration of expectations. 


See you Thursday,
Dr. Bob


seriously? he deliberately didn't come to class because he wanted to test and see whether we would show up because our expectation was that he would take attendance? also "see you thursday"? well guess what, we never did see him that day either...


oh dr. bob, it's going to be another interesting 10 weeks with you.

Snow Day

so today is somewhat a special day. i'm sure you would have guessed given the title, but lehigh has it's first official snow day in like 8 years! we never have any day offs... even in the most snowy days, martin luther king day, labor day. i guess lehigh does have the heart to actually care... or perhaps they don't want anyone to sue them for getting injured from the snow, as it has happened in the past.

but what's also special is that i finally made the decision to blog. it's been in my new year's resolution for sometime now, but all i've been doing is read more and more of other people's blog. so i thought what better way to commemorate this snow day with my blog debut. quite spontaneous really. i woke up thinking i was late to class, even got ready, was about to put a shirt on except i made a smart decision to look out the window in our living room with half my shirt hanging and see absolutely no one walking to go to class. lehigh doesn't even send a mass email announcing school is closed so how am i supposed to know? thank god i checked my email to see that professor wasn't coming in and that work was going to be cancelled. and that's when i thought, aha! im going to use this opportunity to make a blog.

so now you have it... how my blog "you should be me one day..." all began.

edit:
it snowed a total of 2 feet. ended up playing in the snow for at least 3 hours. got buried, got picked up and thrown, got tackled, got wrestled, got hit in the head, everything you can imagine. it was too much fun!