Jonathan Ong's Blog

Here are short thoughts written on my iPhone starting when I got off the train in Aberdeen, Maryland.

The weather is just disgusting. It’s usually 90 degrees in the day, 75 degrees at night, and it’s almost always 100% humid. I’ll be sweating, but I wouldn’t dry.

There are basically no Asians. I’m pretty sure if Asians wanted to live in a hot and humid place, they’d live in Taiwan or something.

I suddenly see an increase in obesity rates. Marylanders are just fatter… Probably because the weather isn’t enjoyable and there’s seriously nothing to do around here.

I haven’t seen so much green in my life since I went to Germany and Austria.

AT&T reception sucks. Everyone here has Verizon or Sprint. I’m the only person I’ve seen with an iPhone.

There are so many bugs! Flies kept landing in me. I actually saw grasshoppers since there’s actually grass here. At nights I actually hear 100 types if insects making noises. There were dead ants on my bicycle seat after I left it out in the rain. Spiderwebs are everywhere, one grew on my friends trunk in a single day. The best of all, there was a toad chilling outside the wall on the balcony.

I thought there was a 24 Hour Fitness everywhere! Well that’s a shame… At least I knew that LA Fitness wouldn’t be here.

I was so bored waiting for the Amtrak, I decided to buy a pack of cigarettes. A pack of Parliament Lights cost $9, but they also don’t have matches and won’t sell you a lighter, and people around here don’t smoke so I can’t ask someone for a light. Biggest waste of $9 ever.

I feel as though I stepped back 30 years in fashion years. Everyone seems to shop at Costco or something.

There are only local banks, I’ve had $800 in my wallet for the past week since I couldn’t find a Bank of America or Chase close by.

Guys love to cuss and drink beer. It might just be a military thing, but the people I work with are civilian researchers. It’s probably because there’s seriously nothing else to do out here… Hence fat people.

The people I’ve seen don’t really care for music. I never hear music blasting or someone singing or anything. They’d rather talk about something. But the music I do hear I love since there’s no black music here, just good old rock.

Everyone’s freaking married! Except the guy I’m living with, but he has a girlfriend who lives far, and this postdoctoral I met, but he’s on the heavy side. It seems like the thing to do here…

Unlike California, there are so many sports teams here that aren’t too far away and are rivals. Thus, people rare really into sports, but I think it’s just cause the weather doesn’t allow anyone to play sports themselves.

Everyone thinks everyone’s an asshole, but I personally don’t think so. This comes from someone who loves New York City and doesn’t think they’re assholes. Do you know who I think are assholes? Cantonese people. They are the definition of asshole. Maybe Californians are made of assholes too, or maybe I’m one too. I do know my bitch radar is off… I don’t find bitchy girls annoying.

Many of my friends or acquaintances ask me, “Jon Ong, why are you such a creeper?” In short, the answer to this question is: I’m a little socially retarded, probably due to the awkwardness of my parents, specifically my dad. He is blunt and has no manners, which, for the most part, rubbed off on me in lieu of my mom’s futile attempt to counteract. I try to compensate, but for the most part don’t care.

I wouldn’t say I’m totally socially retarded since I still have friends who are fun and aren’t addicted to drugs, games, or some other useless “hobbies” and have some sort of career path. By socially retarded I mean I lack the ability to discern specific emotions and reactions. This is a by product of my emphasis on efficiency and honesty over other people’s and my own feelings and emotions. I honestly don’t understand many emotions such as regret, jealousy, and anger. Thus, I avoid giving people emotion advice and support since to me the solution to almost any dramatic situation is simple, though when I do, people always wish they listened instead of acted on their retarded emotions.

I’m never sure if and when people are annoyed or mad at me, but I also don’t really care. My high school teachers viewed my personality as arrogant, but I’ve also never looked up “arrogant” in the dictionary. I use my creepiness to test my friends boundaries, but so far I haven’t reached it. Everyday I wonder if it’s because I’m still an amateur creep or if they are actually my friends. I also wish I knew if girls were interested or not because I usually figure it out way too late.

A very recent example of my creepiness and social retardedness is when I stepped on a toe nail and spent 20 minutes at the hospital soaking my foot in a bucket of solution. Here’s what I tweeted and wrote on my Facebook status afterwards since you don’t get reception in hospitals unless you have Verizon (slightly edited for grammar and specificity):

My dad’s nurse said, “Let me show you my daughter. We decided to hook you two up when she gets older, but you have to wait because she’s only 14.” At first I was like, “Uhhh…” But then she showed me her daughter’s picture on her Blackberry and then I was like, “Okay, maybe.”

During this occurrence, my only thoughts were along the lines of:

Did a mother seriously just try to pimp out her 14 year old daughter to someone 7-8 years older than her?

A nurse WOULD try to pimp her daughter to her doctor’s son.

Why is my dad talking to other people about my non-existent love-life?

Why would a white girl date a bald Asian guy? Gold digger.

However, it didn’t register as creepy until I received the following Twitter reply:

TWeienC @jongleberry I know you pride yourself on your creepiness, so I’m reluctant to compliment you on it, but that was a Top 10 Creepy. Congrats.

I suppose that this is creepy, but neither I nor the nurse thought it was creepy at the time. All she did was smile since she took it as a compliment. Obviously she was seeking a compliment since she wanted to show me her daughter’s picture in the first place. I don’t think I’m going to show a picture of my daughter to any male… haven’t decided on lesbians yet. All I saw was a skinny white girl in a purple dress smiling, so, hey, she might have potential!

We all know you secretly daydreamed about Emma Watson before she turned 18, the only difference being I never thought about taking off that purple dress. I don’t even know how her legs compare to Emma Watson’s (I admit, I probably DID look like a creepy looking for a picture of Emma Watson at It’s a Grind). But holy crap Emma Watson is hot! I wish I went to Brown…

And by now you’re probably thinking, “Wow Jon Ong, you’re starting to write a little bit creepy!” But that’s because I actually am. You see, what I have is a social strategy: my weakness is that I am slightly socially retarded and slightly creepy, so I over-exaggerate my creepiness to turn it into a strength. Instead of being a creepy loner, I’ve grown relationships with girls who let me bite their shoulders and lick their faces and guys who actually read this crap. I’ve turned my awkwardness into ice-breakers and victim-more humor. If I didn’t over-exaggerate my creepiness, I’d have a lot less friends, though sometimes I do wish I was a creepy loner who stayed at home all day and played with Legos.

TL;DR – We all have weaknesses, but most people haven’t figured out how to use their weaknesses to their advantage.

Today in my graduate Numerical Linear Algebra course, Professor Kahan, who substituted for Professor Demmel, discussed the differences between the nonsymmetrical and symmetrical eigenvalue problem. He then asked, “What do matrices and potato chips have in common?”

Attempting to be an active listener, I thought about the possibilities. Since we were discussing symmetric matrices, I thought about a saddle point which has a shape of a Pringles potato chip if it is within a certain boundary. This of course a logical conjecture since the Hessian of a matrix, which tells you if a critical point is a saddle point, is a symmetric matrix.


I then thought about particular shapes which could be present in topology or geometry that I’m not aware about since I prefer numerics, but I wasn’t sure how that could relate to a matrix. I only thought of this because the words “tensor” and “torus” popped into my mind when I heard “potato chips”, the former having to do with matrices (among other things) and the latter with shapes.

Alas, after a good 15 seconds of thinking, he told us the answer:

You can’t just have one.

…ARE YOU SERIOUS? THIS WAS A JOKE? I couldn’t tell because even after he gave his punch line, he still wasn’t laughing, but boy was I laughing inside. I couldn’t believe that he was joking and that I took him so seriously. However, he was talking about dual spaces and how all matrices have one. Too bad I fell asleep in my undergrad linear algebra course so I don’t remember any of that.

The whole lecture was made of these subtle jokes, though this was the only explicit one. I remember his saying, “But it’s miraculous that I remember any of this at my age.” He’s 76 but he sure doesn’t act like it. This was probably one of the single greatest math lecture’s I’ve ever had.

If you don’t know who Kahan is, he’s a very notable mathematician and computer scientist; he even has his own nontrivial wiki! He was the father of the IEEE standard and won a Turing award. Around campus he’s known as the man who wears overalls and despises tech companies for not supporting processors with higher than 64-bit architectures for its numerical accuracy. Who knew he was such a character?

Let us examine the following conversation rigorously. All comments will be in italics and in bullet points. I could probably have been harsh and actually tweeted these comments, but I didn’t know how harsh I wanted to be until the end.

jongleberry: who’s down to picket a Tea Party protest with me?! LOL: http://i30.tinypic.com/34ewz6u.jpg

• I bid thee not go to lemonparty.org. I purposely did not hyperlink it. BTW, my offer still stands.

jongery: So you want to be a counter protester to a tea party? Your Obama koolaid must taste great,we know its less filling.Go Broke.

• Notice: the random capitalizations, the lack of spaces, the rhetorical device of “Koolaid”, and the ambiguous trailing imperative sentence. I know twitter only allows you to type 140 characters, but seriously? This was the first sign of trouble. From now on, I will never overestimate anyone with bad grammar.

jongleberry: that doesn’t even make sense.

jongery: a lot of things don’t make sense like printing money and expecting the future to pay for it.ask yourself,Why can’t we pay now?

• Because your dumb ass president got us into this mess. Your president bailed the banks out.

jongery: a lot of things don’t make sense like the term free healthcare,or a 60 trillion dollar debt but why protest at a tea party?

• 60 trillion dollar debt? We don’t live in Zimbabwe.

jongleberry: you know, I might actually care what you say if you had proper grammar and punctuation. And I’m anti-healthcare, war, and bail out.

jongery: and why are you anti- tea party mr. grammar,by the way,I have read your tweets and you r not beaming out extra intelligence

• I think “extra” intelligence is unnecessary. For me, just some suffices, which you lack in comparison.

jongleberry: i’m anti tea party movement because half the people don’t know what they’re talking about. same for the left side.

jongery: well,i was probably wrong about you,i still disagree,you know if you watch the left portray it,it’s a set up,i was there…

• The Left and the Right are metaphorical in a political spectrum. You can’t actually be “there” at the Left.

jongery: there was a feeling at that tea party event that is indescribable,people there love their country and understand freedom

• You sound like you’re in a religious movement, not a political movement. You’re unintelligent pleas would probably be better suited there.

jongery: tea party is pretty simple to understand,less government,less taxes,less spending,obey the constitution,less corruption,ok

• OK.

jongery: people that attend tea parties just know that something is going very wrong,let’s not make it complicated,$60 trillion debt

• Are you talking about the national debt or the fiscal budget deficit? Wait… are you talking about Credit Default Swaps? You do realize that those are caused by the private sector, not the public sector, right?

jongleberry: remember, most of our debt and problems are from the Bush era. At least Obama’s going to spend money on us, not other countries.

jongery: that koolaid must be good,obama is going into debt 5 times as much as bush,and he is in iraq and afghanistan still

• I don’t understand this Koolaid reference. Is it because Obama is black?

jongleberry: i hope you know that with that horrible grammar, punctuation, and lame rhetorical devices no one is going to take you seriously.

jongery: stop avoiding issues liberal man from san fran

• I already told you I’m not liberal.

jongery: you worry about grammar and punctuation,I will bring substance,something you are incapable of,your tweets are zeros,

• I don’t understand how a tweet can be “zero”. Mathematically, a tweet can not equal zero unless you are declaring a variable’s value. And I don’t know how it can be more than one zero unless it’s a vector. I’, pretty sure my tweets can’t be formed into vectors of all zeros since it has to at least be binary to hold some information.

jongery: I bet you can’t wait for an ambiguouslygay tweet to cum your way,maybe ladygaga inspires your political whining,you little jerk

• You know you win an internet battle when your opponent calls you a jerk.

jongery: we have decided to move on without you,you are obviously a lost cause,a total loss,it would take too much time to repair you

• Who are “we” in this context? I never knew I was speaking to more than one person… unless you suffer from Dissociative Identity Disorder, which is different Schizophrenia might I add.

jongery: Your last tweet talking about my grammr,punct,and rhetorical devices is written so poorly. It does reveal how foolish you are

• My WordPress just underlined “,punct,” for a grammatical mistake and I just seriously laughed out loud.

jongleberry: i’m sorry you took offense to that statement.

• I should’ve said something childish like, “Aw, are you about to cry? Would you like some cheese with that whine?”

jongery: your words “I hope you know that with that” ,and relook at your tweets,they aren’t written well at all,c’mon brain stem

• Actually, that is correct English. I think that all that “that” perplexed that thing inside that head that some (apes) might consider a brain. Let me introduce you to a little something called Schoolhouse Rock! You might learn a thing or two. Or not.

jongery: bye goofy,i know you have to catch up with ladygaga and ambiguouslygay,enjoy your san francisco treats

• He totally got me with the ambiguouslygay, I admit, but homophobia much? And Lady GaGa’s phantom penis has more talent and intelligence than you ever will. And pussy.

However, you can’t learn about a man just from a conversation with him. You must do some research! The link on his Twitter is his MySpace. Yes, a MySpace. If you are interested in a laugh, check it out. Let me summarize his MySpace for you:

• Friends: 11, 1 of which is Tom.
• Comments: 4, 3 of which are from the same person speaking Spanish, sending gifts, discussing MySpace applications. The last makes him look like a creeper: “hey cute stuff how are ya an no my lips are not digitally enhanced???? why would i do that
  they are my REAL LIPS just like my ass an my breasts come on now what the hell I am not fake”
• College: Florida Southern College, 1982-1983 and University of Connecticut, 1984-1987. Majors: Baseball,Booze,Psychology, Minor: Studying, Clubs: Streaking Club
• Age: 45
• Status: Single. Sorry.
• Occupation: Hack

I seriously LOL’d. I don’t think I’d have a MySpace or Facebook if I didn’t have any friends or anything half interesting to post. And his occupation? He’s a Chicago taxi driver.

Looking at his other tweets, you find that he is a follower of Glenn Beck. Have you actually watched one of his shows? I seriously wonder how he’s still on TV. Oh wait, he’s on Fox.

I found that there are a lot of people who follow unreliable pundits like Beck or Limbaugh, mostly outside of California. They seem to be uneducated, emotional, irrational, and politically charged. I consequently lose faith in America. I’m anti-war, anti-bailout, and anti-healthcare, but please, let’s be smart about it. Take some economics courses. Learn the idea of checking a source’s authority. You remind me of my mom except my mom channels her energy into religious movements, which you should probably think about doing.

So today I bought the first pack of cigarettes in a month in preparation for finals. Immediately a hobo bummed one, which I happily obliged. Unbeknownst to me the events that ensued convinced me that this man who calls himself “Juan” is the epitome of the locality they refer to as “Berkeley”.

There are many things in life I ask myself, “why?” One specific question is “why do you black people name their kids with Mexican names?” French names I understand… like Chantal, except they spell it Chantelle because they can’t spell correctly in English, let alone French. But then again, everyday I see something in Berkeley and just ask myself, “why would you do such a thing to yourself?”

The first thing this man did was break the filter off the cigarette. This is, like the rest of Berkeley, disgusting. I don’t know how a hygienic individual can do such a thing.

He then asked that I not use the lighter because it wastes energy; he lit his cigarette with mine. Wow you environmentalist, so conservative with energy you refuse to work and find a home.

Then out of the blue he starts discussing food, which I know nothing about. But not just any type of food, but organic food, and he knew a LOT about it. He was telling me all these herbs that I had no idea about and recommended that I eat these falafels. I didn’t know homeless people knew how to eat, or even eat well.

He then started ranting about about Eastern food practices. How the hell does a homeless black man know about this? By reading he said. He memorized some book in 21 days, but he doesn’t consider himself smart or that he has a lot of knowledge. WTF he probably read more than I’ve read in my whole life in those 21 days. You modest intelligent bastard!

God. Berkeley is so weird.