This post is over 15 years old and may contain information that is incorrect, outdated, or no longer relevant.
My views and opinions can change, and those that are expressed in this post may not necessarily reflect the ones I hold today.
Quote of the Day
“Parkzer, I feel miserable.”
“Why? What happened?”
“I achieved a 1 on my AP Chemistry exam. 0____0 “
“LOL ACHIEVED?”
That was part of a conversation that I had over instant messaging with one of my good buddies, the one and only, Benjamin Chow.
What I’m Watching
After receiving a recommendation from a friend, I watched a movie titled Mean Girls earlier today. Not only did my friend recommend the movie to me because she thought it was funny for me to watch a chick flick, she also thought I would like it because of my interest in a human’s function within society.
Mean Girls features Lindsay Lohan, who plays Cady, a girl that moved to the northern Illinois area from Africa after her mom decided to enroll in university for ten years. The move came with some tough transitions, the primary one being Cady’s switch from being home schooled to attending a public high school.
After Cady’s first few days at school as a junior, she quickly learns that the student body is heavily divided into a variety of subcultures. Two of her new friends explain the cliques to her, emphasizing their importance. They also introduce her to the Plastic group, a trio of girls into fashion and physical appearance. Not long after, Cady finds herself mixed in with the Plastic group, and at the same time, acting as a spy for her original two friends, now identified as part of the art group.
Things take a quick turn when relationship and academic issues start pushing themselves into Cady’s life. Because of the boy she likes, Cady is rapidly separating from the leader of the Plastics. Because of her involvement in two completely different social groups, she is rapidly losing friendships all together. After the public debut of the Burn Book, everything goes wrong.
I think that Mean Girls is one of the better movies that I’ve watched. Not only was it entertaining, it also presents an issue that many people can relate to. I would recommend this movie to pretty much anyone, even the guys that think they’re too tough to watch chick flicks – if they don’t like the storyline, at least they’ll like the actresses.
Question of the Day
A lot of my friends that know me in person and went to the same high school as me know that my college admission decision was made extremely late. For an extremely long time, when people asked what college I’m going to, I had to respond with “I don’t know yet.” Obviously, we’re well into the summer and, obviously, I know what college I’m going to go to now. So, I decided to answer this question today: “What undergraduate college are you going to, and why did your admission decision take so long?”
I am going to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Madison, Wisconsin, USA.
As for the reason my decision was made several weeks after everyone else got their admission decisions, the primary reason was due to the University of Wisconsin-Madison Admissions staff rejecting the ACT scores on my high school transcript.
In Illinois, at the high school I attended, it is mandatory for all juniors (11th graders) to take the ACT in-school. The results of this test is combined with another test called the WorkKeys test and yields a score for the Prairie State Achievement Exam. Obviously, I participated in this examination just like everyone else in my graduating class. Because this test is taken in-school, the results of this test are printed on the high school’s official transcript.
Unfortunately, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, unlike many other schools, does not accept scores on high school transcripts as valid. Upon receiving the scores on my transcript, the University of Wisconsin-Madison Admissions staff contacted me, stating that they required official scores sent directly from the ACT testing company. The worst part was, the admissions staff notified me of this discrepancy after the final applications were due.
Because there was a misunderstanding with the admission procedure, and because I took responsibility for overlooking a portion of their website stating that all ACT scores must be sent directly from the ACT company, I was given extra time to resubmit my scores, under the penalty that my admission decision would arrive late. I accepted the offer and sent in the request to the ACT testing company to send my scores directly to the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Even though I had already been accepted to a few other colleges, I didn’t want to tell anyone which colleges these were; I learned from experience that the more information I distribute, the more it tends to mutate. I didn’t want random rumors being made and spread, so I told everyone that I still did not know where I was going until I was sure of the decision from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Immediately after learning that I was accepted, I stopped answering everyone’s questions with “I don’t know” and started responding with “University of Wisconsin-Madison.”
What I’m Watching
I haven’t been keeping up with my reading, so instead of “What I’m Reading,” I decided to do a quick review of a movie I watched yesterday and do a “What I’m Watching” section. The movie is called 
At the beginning of the movie, there was a note that said that the movie was based off a game called Street Fighter. I vaguely remember hearing of it somewhere, but I never played it before, so I knew from the beginning that I was probably not going to understand it as well as I could.
Although the whole movie itself was somewhat action-packed, I felt the movie had difficulty leaning toward an attempt at reality or purely science fictional. At times, it seemed like the producers tried to make the movie emulate something that could actually happen in real life, but then in some segments, it completely ignored that and added something farfetched and odd. Basically, it was slightly inconsistent.
As for the plotline, there seemed to be multiple conflicts arising and falling that sometimes had little relation to one another. For example, one of the introductory conflicts was when the main character’s father gets kidnapped by a group of criminals. Another conflict arises randomly toward the end when the leader of the criminal group, Bison, receives his daughter as a shipment, and the international police force comes to stop Bison from maintaining posession of the daughter. I don’t know if there was something in the game that involved the shipment of a human being as a package, but either way, it seemed confusing.
The Internet Movie Database’s user rating for this movie as of today is a 3.8 out of 10. Although I would probably rate it a bit higher than that because of the random bursts of action and because it incorporates martial arts, one of the only sports that I like, I still wouldn’t recommend it as a “good” movie. I suggest watching this movie only if you’re interested in random bits of entertainment from action scenes, and a little bit of tension here and there from the plot progression.
If you have both played the Street Fighter game and have watched this movie, and your opinion differs from mine, feel free to contribute to the Discussion section at the bottom of this blog post.
Question of the Day
A lot of my blog posts lately have involved my presence at my family’s business. A handful of people have asked me what my family’s business is. So today’s question of the day is, “What exactly is your family business?”
Although it may have been a little obvious from the pictures I took, my family’s business is a self-service coin laundry. Essentially, our business is a massive one-story building with tons of washing machines and dryers ranging in size from machines that take a single load of laundry to machines that can wash a few comforters at once.
Our customers use our business by bringing in dirty clothing from home and using our machines to wash and dry them. All the machines are coin-operated, so our customers either bring their own quarters, or bring paper money and use our coin changers to exchange them for quarters. Each machine has a different cost to operate, depending on how big it is.
The target of our business is generally people that either cannot afford a washing machine and dryer, do not have enough space in their house or apartment for a washing machine and dryer, or choose not to purchase a washing machine and dryer. Of course, people that have blankets and comforters that are too large for their washer and dryer also come to use our laundromat. Occasionally, we have people that come because their washer and dryer at home are broken.
I have some