Grad school apps are one of the worst things ever. Specifically the personal statement section. I KNOW what I want to write, but whatever I type just doesn't seem good enough, like I'm not using the right words or making it exciting enough. And so then my motivation to work on them just gets lower and lower.. Not a good cycle. I just have to sit down and do it, even if it doesn't come out perfect. SOMEONE has to accept me, right? Who knows where I shall end up.

Grad school apps aside, there is a $50 Visa Gift Card that I should spend soon so they don't start taking monthly fees out of it. The prospect of being forced to buy something for myself is new to me. I keep thinking of what I should get with this money but I am not knowing. Here are some things I've been considering: new computer speakers, new TV (obviously more than $50), Xbox 360, GPS... that's really all I can think of.

The list of things I want for Christmas has gotten shorter and shorter over the years. Does this mean that I'm getting more content with what I have? Or maybe the things I want are something my parents aren't going to buy me for a holiday aka a new car, new tv, grad school tuition, etc...

I saw Avatar 3d last night and I think I blinked like 3 times in that whole 2 hours and 40 minutes. The visual effects were incredible.

Christmas Break

Ah yes... Christmas break. My favorite time of year. Not only is it one of the best chances to relax and have lots of free time, there are Christmas lights everywhere! And I get to spend a lot of time with family. So good memories and quotes I've had so far this break:


Me: Ahhh should I buy that new TV??
Gma: Well do you actually watch a lot of TV?
Me: I would if I had a nice one.
Gma: Well if I had a brain, I'd be a brain surgeon.
Me: ......?
- Talking to my grandma about getting a new TV

"Seven lords a milking"
- My grandpa's guess as to what is on the 7th day of Christmas

Playing Scattegories and Pictionary with my family.

Mom: Andrew, what are the 3 things you look most for in a girl?
me: I'll have to get back to you on that one.
Mom (a day later): Have you thought of the 3 things yet?
me: not yet
Mom: No wonder you don't have any dates
Me: sigh

Playing DDR and Diablo with Brian.

Anyways that's all the good stuff I can think of right now. While I was sitting in Christmas Eve mass, I had some time to reflect, and I came up with a New Year's Resolution. It's a bit general but I know what I need to do from it: Get it together. Yup, get it together. Life is going pretty well right now, but I'm at a point where I really need to get more organized and figure things out. Sometimes I tend to have a kind of go-with-the-flow attitude towards the future. I need to get my things together, clean up my room, get back to grad school apps, do Mentorship stuff, etc..

When there are a lot of things I should be doing, they sometimes cancel each other out, like if 2 equal forces are pulling in opposite directions. Then I end up feeling guilty about doing neither. I just gotta get down to it, even if it means sacrificing free time. This is hard for me to do, because I really value free time. Going out and being busy is great, and some people like to keep themselves completely busy, but I feel like I'm one of those people that needs their free, personal time. Just time to be alone and relax and chill. That's hard to do being Program Director for Mentorship and working at the same time, while trying to do grad school apps and now adding on doing WALL as well. This may well be one of the busiest times of my life. I just have to do my best to manage my time, trying to leave some free time where possible.

Well, the new year's resolution starts with cleaning up my room. It may seem like a trivial thing but I think it's a step toward organizing my life. Then comes making a list of what I need to do. Then working on grad school apps...

All right, that's enough for one post. Merry Christmas!

Hey Mr. Mendoza

I've been working as a Teaching Assistant for my 5th grade class for a few months now. When I first applied for the job, I had no idea what grade they were going to place me in, so I was ready to work anywhere from preschool to 6th grade. Now looking back, I'm really happy I got placed in the 5th grade. The kids are still silly and energetic at times (ok still most of the time), but are also mature enough to sit down and talk. I also shouldn't generalize the 5th grader though, because the students in my class are anything but uniform. There is such a wide variety of personality and maturity in this class, like each kid is their own separate character.

I've never worked with the same group of kids for so long and for so much time. I've worked with kids a lot before, but Unicamp is only a week long. Because I'm with them so much, I'm really starting to get to know them each on a really personal level, discovering their interests, personal history, quirks, habits, problems.. They are all so interesting in their own way, and I'm glad I'm going to get to keep working with them for the year.

On the flip side, they are also getting to know me pretty well. Surprisingly well in fact. They've noticed that I only shave once a week (with some of the girls demanding that I shave more), that most of my clothes are comprised of UCLA and Unicamp gear ("You need to lay off the Woodsey clothes, mister!"), and that I smile a lot (one of them calls me Mr. Smiley). Everyone in the class calls me Mr. Mendoza, though some of them pronounce it "Mr. Mandoza," and a few of them, deeming Mr. Mandoza too long to say, shortened my name to simply "Mr. Man." Eh, close enough. A couple of them saw my BruinCard from when I was a first-year, with the picture looking like I just came out of the military, and they laughed at me. Also, for some reason, it's a huge deal when a kid finds out your first name. One time one of the teachers let it slip in front of the class, and they were like.. *GASP*. Your real name is Andrew?! Like Mr. Mendoza is a fake name. :P

Life Update

Hello blog.

Sometimes I forget to write in my blog until someone reminds me that it's here. Anyhoo, it's been a while, so LIFE UPDATE TIME!

1. I've started working at UCLA Lab School, formerly known as University Elementary School, as a full time TA for 5th grade. In a closely related subject, I am now officially getting old. The kids call me Mr. Mendoza, I'm paying rent all by myself, and I don't go out past 10pm if it's a weeknight.
The job itself is pretty good - I'm getting a lot of experience working with kids, and hopefully it'll help me figure out if teaching is what I really want to do. The kids are very observant - they've noticed that I smile all the time, have a really loud laugh, and wear camp shirts a lot. They've also noticed that I only shave once a week.

2. I'm living in a new apartment this year with my roommate from first year, the legend BC (Brandon Contreras) himself, thus bringing my roommate cycle full circle. The apartment is a lot nicer than my old apartment (See: The Worst Apartment Ever) - it's bigger, the rooms aren't awkwardly shaped, it doesn't smell, it has reception, and there are no cockroaches. So +5 for new apartment. The manager was really mean at first, but I think I'm getting on his good side. On a downside, I saw some termites inside last week, but I swiftly killed them all and haven't seen anymore... yet...

3. Mentorship is really starting up now. My co-program director and I spent a lot of the summer writing our funding proposal, and I'm happy to say that a few days ago we found out that we got MONAY IN THE BANK! We got $9845 out of the 10000 we asked for, so we were very pleased.

4. I found a new show: How I Met Your Mother. It's quickly becoming one of my favorite shows.

5. I started playing Pokemon again. I played it on the car ride back from Vegas with my family this summer, and since then I've still been playing it. Although I'm playing less now because of #1 and #3.

The Westwood Omelette

I realized that my past few posts have been me ranting about stuff I didn't like, so I decided it was time to write about something of which I revere: The Westwood Omelette.

The Westwood Omelette at Headlines is my favorite meal in Westwood. The omelette seriously has everything you could ever ask for in an omelette, and more. It's like God descended from the Heavens, looked at the omelettes we had here on Earth, and said, "No no you silly humans, here is how you make an omelette." God then proceeded to create the Westwood Omelette and entrusted Headlines with the task of distributing His creation to the world at a reasonable price. God looked at the Westwood Omelette and said, "Yes, this is good."

I was trying to find a picture of it online and I couldn't find one, but the picture wouldn't do it justice anyways. Just imagine in your head a huge omelette, with cheese, avocado, bacon, ham, and tomatoes, served with delicious hash browns and french toast. Now imagine that x10 and you have the Westwood Omelette. I realize that an omelette may not seem like a thing to get this excited over, but only those who have not tasted the Westwood Omelette would think such things. I hope to some day live in a world where everyone appreciates the Westwood Omelette for what it really is, and I have them served to me in bed on a platter every morning by little Headlines fairies. Until then, if you're down to go get a Westwood Omelette at Headlines, I'm down as well.

Music on the Radio

So I was driving home on the freeway today, flipping through my radio stations like I usually do, and I hear this catchy song, and I think to myself.. "wow, maybe there's actually something good on the radio now!" Turns out it was a commercial for Toyota. And that's when I really realized it: the radio, for the most part, just does not satisfy my musical needs anymore. All these new songs seriously sound the same.. And at one point on my drive, that one song, "Tonight's Gonna be a Good Night" or whatever it's called, was playing on 3 stations at once. I only like this song when I'm in the car with other people, cause then it's like.. ya know, tonight is gonna be a good night with my friends, and the lyrics are simple enough to repeat over and over. But when you're driving by yourself, the song just gets annoying and repetitive in my opinion.

Sorry, I got a little caught up on my rant on that Good Night song. But yea, I've been resorting to turning off the radio and just singing in the car by myself. Not even singing along with the radio.. just singing by myself. I find it a lot more entertaining than most of the radio. Unfortunately, my car does not have a CD player, and the tape player also isn't working so I can't use the tape converter for my ipod. It's hard to emphasize how unfortunate this is, because good music would make car rides a heck of a lot more fun.

Then again, maybe this is just me getting old and not liking all this new crazy music that kids listen to nowadays. Don't get me wrong, I do like some of the new stuff that's out there. But for the large part, I don't like the general trend of where the music industry is going right now. Specifically in the rap/hip hop genre, which is mostly what the radio plays. Maybe I just need to find some new stations? I've found myself starting to drift away from kroq, kiis fm, and amp radio to more mellow stations like My FM and Coast.. :P

The Worst Apartment Ever

Ok, so I've only lived in two apartments so far, and one of them was a furnished University Apartment, but I can say with a fair amount of confidence that the apartment I stayed in last year is one of the worst apartments, if not the worst apartment, in the Westwood apartment area. Where do I begin...

I guess there are a lot of little things that add up to big problems, and there are also big things that are just big problems on their own.

1. Smell. The apartment building had a variety of odors, none of which were all too pleasant. Depending on where you were in the building, you could experience a different foul odor. The elevator often smelled of alcohol and trash, our own apartment often smelled of secondhand smoke, courtesy of the chronic weed smokers elsewhere in the complex, and in the hallways you could actually smell a plethora of different aromas as you walked the length of the corridor. Someone wrote "This place STANK!" on the elevator door halfway through the year, and the mark was definitely warranted.

2. Reception. Or rather, lack thereof. It wasn't very convenient getting voice messages and missed calls hours after they were placed. Nor was it fun having to go outside the building every time I wanted to make a call.

3. Ya know, the place was just OLD, and in need or repair. They just need to shut down the building for a while and renovate the place. When we first moved in, they claimed that they "cleaned" the carpet, which apparently doesn't include removing bits of trash and nails. My closet doors were broken all year, though they "fixed" it a few times. At one point in the year all the burners in our stove stopped working. The water from our bathroom sink and shower was brown for a while, and sometimes it smelled like sewage. I learned to always smell the water first before using it.

4. Floor plan. The apartment had the most awkward floor plan I have every seen. Who makes rooms in pentagon shape?? It's like the place wasn't designed to accommodate furniture (or people for that matter).

5. Roaches. I saved the best for last, because this is what really made the whole apartment experience. Let me introduce you to our 5th roommate, the cockroach colony. They were there when we first moved in, and who knows how long they had already been there. Naturally, we complained, filled out request forms, etc, every time leading to an attempt at spraying down the place and leaving nice smells (see #1). However, I am fairly confident that all the spraying did was cause the roaches to evolve into bigger and stronger roaches. Survival of the fittest at its best. In the beginning of the year, they were actually pretty small and slow. Towards the end of the year, they had gotten much bigger in size, and I'm pretty sure some of them were starting to evolve wing-like structures on their backs. Thankfully I'm not going to be around when they finally do evolve the ability to fly. Seeing as how the feeble attempts of the apartment service were only making the roaches stronger, we had to take matters into our own hands. This marked the beginning of a longstanding war between us and the roach colony. We bought traps and our own spray, but the roaches had numbers on their side. Clearly, a large scale attack was needed. And so about halfway through the year, The Purge happened - we cleaned everything possible, sprayed in every corner, and for once we thought everything was going to be ok. We slept peacefully that night. Unfortunately, it was a false sense of comfort. The next day, the roaches were already back. I'm pretty sure all we did was anger them. And so we conceded to a truce - they stay in the kitchen and come out only at night, and we'd just let them be. This worked for a while, but blatant violations of the truce soon began, and we were powerless to stop it, still being demoralized from the failed Purge. It got to the point that sometimes I would open up a drawer, watch a cockroach scramble out from inside one of my bowls, and be like "eh." By the end of the year, we knew that we had clearly lost the war. Whenever I would go out into the kitchen at night, I would give the roaches a 10 second grace period after I turned on the lights to run and hide in their little corners, so I could at least pretend like they weren't there. Towards the end of the year though, they just stayed where they were after I turned on the lights, mocking me, knowing that I was defeated and powerless...

For the price we paid, the apartment was nothing short of robbery. There was ONE redeeming factor about the place, and that was that we had free fire in the fireplace. You could flip a lightswitch, and a fire would come on in the fireplace! Sometimes I would turn on the fire even if it was hot, because it was the only good thing about the apartment, and I wanted to cling to that light in dark times.