Big 5. Shoe life.

Ah summer vacation... how I love you for the free time and relaxation you give me. I'm a person who truly needs down time to just chill every once in a while, so summer vacation is great for me. But alas, I am not truly free, as I must have some source of income to stay afloat, especially with huge grad school loans on the horizon. Enter Big 5 Sporting Goods.


I swore to myself a couple summers ago that I would never set foot in a Big 5 as an employee again, but I sold my soul this summer because I needed a flexible job fast that would give me time off whenever I please. So once again, I put on my business casual outfit with my "Andrew" name tag.

So what is it really like working at Big 5? There are a few key skills you need to work as a Big 5 employee, and this is them:

#1. You have to own a business casual outfit and be clean shaven.

#2. You have to be alive.

Well actually that's pretty much it. So what happens when customers ask you questions about stuff in the store? In general, I'm pretty good at pointing people in the general direction of an item that they're looking for. However, when people ask me specific questions about an item, my knowledge becomes much more variable. When it comes to answering questions about running shoes and camping stuff, I might actually be able to help. With most other stuff my helping skills drop to about zero, and for guns/rifles, knives, and fishing gear, my help actually goes into the negatives. Meaning that if I try to answer a question, there's a good chance that the customer will walk out of the store with less knowledge than they came in with. Here, example interactions at the gun counter:


1. Customer: So what's the biggest legal size of a knife blade that you can carry in your pocket?

Me: o_O


2. Customer: I'm looking for one of those automatic rifles. You know, the ones that go 'bahbahbahbah!'. Do you guys carry those?

Me: .........Let me get the manager.


Those are some pretty typical interactions around the gun counter. Since our Big 5 branch is pretty close to Disneyland, we also get a lot of tourists who don't know how to speak English, so a lot of my interactions with people are actually done with improvised sign language. Sometimes we succeed in communicating, and sometimes they just give up and leave the store. One time, an old Asian lady grabbed me by the arm and dragged me to a clothes rack, where she proceeded to stare at me for a good 7-8 seconds. After asking if there was anything I could help her with and more awkward staring, we just ended up walking away from each other...


Anyways, for anyone who wants to work at Big 5, there are 2 big pieces of advice I can give you.

#1. Try not to look at the time for as long as possible. It only makes it worse.

#2. When faced with a question you don't know, and this will be about 85% of the time, make up an answer that is vague enough that it sounds legit, but not specific enough that they can call you out on it. Example interaction:

Customer: What kind of swimming goggles would you recommend for my son?

Me: Well, basically the higher you go in price, the better quality you're going to get. This here is a pretty good brand (point to random item on the shelf). See, it has all these features (proceed to read the features straight from the box).


And there you go. You're ready to work at Big 5.

P.S. In case you're wondering about the title of this blog, it was something I saw on a piece of tape stuck to the wall in the backroom at Big 5, and it pretty much sums up what goes down at Big 5. :P

UCLA Lab School

Well, my last day as a 5th Grade Teaching Assistant for the UCLA Lab School has finally passed. I'm so thankful I got the opportunity to do something like this; when I applied I think there were around 80 or so applicants.. don't know how I got the job, maybe because I slipped a 5 in with my application. I LOVE working with the 5th grade age group though, to the point I hope I don't regret choosing to teach high school math. If I do, I can always go down to 5th grade, right? That's actually what one of the teachers in my class did, so it's not like it's impossible. I don't ever want to feel "stuck" in a job, so if I don't enjoy the high school level, who knows, maybe I'll be a 5th grade teacher. :) No lower than 5th grade though, then they get too young even for me. I don't know how my Grandma did Grade K for 40 something years..

Being a teaching assistant is a unique experience, because you get to know the kids so well. I think you develop a different kind of relationship with them than the teachers (I'll know this for sure after I've been teaching for a while). I definitely got to joke around with them more and just talk to them more than the teachers did though, and I'll miss that about being a TA. It's only been a couple days, but I already miss my class a lot. Hopefully I'll get to work at the school again part-time next year so I can go visit them.

Anyways, I'm back at home now, and I've become extremely jumpy because of the recent reports of waterbugs seen in my area of the house. I've been doing scans before I enter a room to make sure they're not there.. The other day I was doing a scan before I went into the bathroom, and what I think was a piece of dust moved on the floor, and I literally jumped. I need to calm down a bit.

End of Chapter

I have once again reached the end of another chapter in my life. This chapter was a year long and is now finally coming to a close. Mentorship events are over and is winding down, I have 2 weeks left of being a TA at UCLA Lab School, and Unicamp meetings are over as well.

Although I will definitely miss being Program Director for Mentorship, a large part of me is just plain relieved that it is over. I feel like I've sacrificed a lot of relationships with friends, and I'm excited to get my old life back, in a way. That means finally hanging out with people that I kept saying I was too busy to hang out with. And, catching up on my shows/video games of course. One thing I learned about myself this year, among other things, is that I definitely value my "me time". Even if it's just a few hours of a day, it's nice to just sit around and do nothing for a while.

I am going to miss my 5th grade class. A lot. This year was unique, and I probably won't get another chance like it, since I'm going into high school math. The 5th grade is such an interesting age, because you can have real conversations with most of these kids, and a lot of them are so funny and quirky. Knowing that there's only 2 weeks left, I'm really valuing my last days with them. Some of them are already telling me that they wish I could stay and asking why I'm leaving. I hope I get to stay in contact with them and see how they're doing in the years to come.

In other news, I'm excited to move home for the summer. This might be the last summer that my whole family is living in the same house. I never laugh as much as I do at home with my family, so I'm going to savor it while I can. Example: last night, we were playing Loaded Questions and Mom was the guesser. The question was: "What muscle would you flex to impress someone?" My brother and I both said "brain", and my dad and sister both said "butt." Pretty much sums up the family. :P

I Heart NY!

Last week, I broke my strong spring break tradition of sitting at home doing nothing to fly to NJ and visit my sister at St. Peter's College, and I had an AMAZING time! It was my first time in the NJ/NY area, and I loved it. But NY alone didn't make the trip as good as it was - hanging out with my sister and meeting her awesome group of friends played a huge part. They were all so nice/funny, and they made me feel right at home. I thought it was so cool how they hang out with each other all the time, popping in and out of each other's apartments; it reminded me of my first year in the dorms and how I would visit people all the time, and apparently how much I miss being with people all the time. I'm gonna try to spend more time just hanging out with people :)

Some things I want to remember from my trip:

- Tripp's story of how I got the nickname "ATM"

- Mae's story of how someone used the word "noob" in a college paper

- the night Joe thought he had scabies

- Greg doing the John Cena rap (b-b-basic thugonomics)

- winning the game of Mario Party

- when Yomi lost her nose ring ("I'm Yomi with a nose ring!")

- going to the top of the empire state building/seeing times square with kimberly

- visiting columbia and the village with dee lou

- seeing my dinosaur family in the natural history museum

- the subway catching on fire

- spending the day in ny with tripp and mae - playing on every playground we passed, visiting MIB headquarters, and chasing a turkey in Battery Park

- watching Indian in the Cupboard for the first time since childhood and being severely disappointed

- watching Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and it being surprisingly good

- realizing that my sister wasn't exaggerating about living in the ghetto, how many black people there are at her school, and the size of her school being the size of royce plaza at ucla

- having my mom text me every few hours to see what i was doing, and having her send the same text again if i didn't respond within an hour

If I think of anything more, I'll add it later. If you're reading this and are one of the people I spent the week with - THANK YOU for making it such an amazing week. I really wish I could have stayed longer, and I hope to come back and visit again soon :)

Colorblindness

For those of you who don't know, I am indeed colorblind. Mostly red/green colorblind, to be exact. So what does this mean? Well, until my first year of college at UCLA, I didn't even know I was colorblind, so it honestly doesn't make that much of a difference. I found out that I was colorblind during my Psych 10 class, when there was one of those colorblind tests - the one where you're supposed to see a number in a bunch of colored dots.. and I couldn't see the number -_-

You know that part in Little Miss Sunshine when the son finds out that he's colorblind and flips out in the car? Yea.. my reaction was nothing like that haha. I mean, I had gone through my whole life just fine thinking that the colors I saw were the colors everyone else saw - I think it's just something that most people assume.

Being colorblind honestly doesn't bother me at all, but ever since I've found out I was colorblind, there are some instances where I found out things I never knew about from normal-vision people. For example, I just found out the other day that Microsoft Word actually has two different colors for underlining mistakes - one for grammatical and one for spelling. Definitely had no idea that those were different colors. About a month ago, I found out that the status dots on Gchat actually come in different colors too - green for available and red for busy. As you can see, these are definitely not life-altering revelations, but it does make me wonder what other things I will discover down the line that everyone else just seems to know. And the thing is, I won't discover these things unless a normal-vision person happens to bring it up in conversation, like the Microsoft Word incident. These little revelations are interesting. :)

When they find out I'm colorblind, people always ask me "Ooooh, what do you see?". And I never know what to tell them. It's not like I see black and white, I definitely see colors.. just not the colors that everyone else sees. And it's weird, because I have distinct ideas of what red and green are, but sometimes I can't tell them apart or can't tell if something is red or green. So in those instances where I can't tell if a color is red or green... what AM I seeing? Well, that's a really good question. It's hard to describe colors though - I mean, what would you say to someone if they asked you to describe the color blue?

Anyways, there have only been 3 actual instances I can remember where colorblindness has hindered me from doing something:

1. In a lecture when the teacher was using green and red sharpies do draw diagrams on the board.

2. In Mario Kart, sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between the red and green shells and I have to aim them like green shells just in case.

3. In tetris-like games based on matching colors together.

I'd also like to attribute my poor fashion sense to colorblindness too, but I'm pretty sure that's just me.

Busy Indicators

So I've been pretty busy these past few weeks with Mentorship/Unicamp/work, and I've noticed there are definitely a few indicators that tells how busy I am.

1. The cleanliness of my room - Especially the clothes on floor/bed : clothes in hamper ratio. Right now that ratio is pretty high.

2. My beard - Shaving is a luxury activity that I partake in when I have ample time. Right now my beard is pretty shaggy.

3. The number of LOST episodes that I'm behind - I'm currently 2 episodes behind for the newest season. In another few days I'll be 3 episodes behind, which is borderline unacceptable, but will make for an epic catchup session.

4. The number of pages my bookmark has moved in my book - I've been on the same book since Winter break actually (The Black Hole War, good stuff).

5. The number of times I update my blog - It's been a while since I've updated this thing. Since the last time I've updated, some pretty big stuff has happened. Let's see... It looks like I am officially going to be a Bruin for another 2 years! I got into UCLA's grad school for Education and I just submitted my Statement of Intent to Register the other day. That'll make it 7 years that I've been around UCLA. That's almost a third of my life!

Also, I finally caved and got a new TV. A 32' Samsung LCD HDTV to be exact. For the past few years, what has happened is that my urge to get a new TV will keep increasing until it reaches the threshold point, at which point I'll call my mom and she'll talk me out of it, returning the urge to a base point. However, this time when I reached the threshold, my mom said I should go ahead and get it since I've been wanting it for so long. And that just pushed me over the edge.

Power Out

I had an interesting experience the other night. As I was sitting at my computer around 10pm, the power went out. The loud hum of my roommate's desktop computer died, and the room went completely black except for the glow of my laptop, now living off battery.

Now I haven't been in a blackout in a while, but this particular one brought with it much more than just darkness. It brought freedom. That's right: freedom. That might seem like a weird thing to come with a blackout - I mean I couldn't really do anything. I couldn't go on the internet because the router was out, couldn't watch tv, couldn't read because it was too dark. BUT, I also couldn't do any work for Mentorship, grad school apps, etc.. and with that came the amazing, guilt-free feeling of being incapable to work on anything. For once I could finally just take a second to just sit back and really just.. think. It was like a huge weight had been temporarily lifted off my shoulders, and I was free from all obligations.

Ah, what a great feeling that was. It was almost ridiculous how happy it made me feel for that hour or so. It was kind of a wake-up call that I'm probably trying to take on too much at once - what with being Program Director for Mentorship, doing W.A.L.L for Unicamp, working as a full-time TA, and applying to grad schools.. So, note to self: After this is all said and done, I need to cut back on the amount of stuff I try to take on at once. I love volunteering and having responsibility, but I'm learning more and more that my "free time" is just as valuable. I need time to just chill, catch up with friends, relax.. something I haven't really had time to do these past couple weeks, and probably won't have a significant amount of until June. *sigh*

Well, lesson learned. I'll just have to suck it up these next 5-6 months. Who knows, maybe there will be another blackout some time. :)