Catherine (other roommate) moved in today. Her original living arrangements did not work out, and my place had 3 bedrooms anyway. Ironically we had asked Catherine long ago if she wanted to join our 3-bedroom condo, but she declined because she had found her apartment beforehand and already paid the deposit. It turns out that her apartment was having electrical issues (no power), so the landlady had to put Catherine in a hotel. On top of that, the area in general was apparently very janky and unsafe (it’s more downtown).

My condo is in a more resort-like area with just old, retired people. The drive is pretty far from our condo to Catherine’s clinic, but our fully furnished condo is very nice and in a really safe area for a very cheap price, so she was ecstatic to live here. She had been living in hotels for the last week while looking for new housing and waiting for news on my condo. Pauline and her husband are the ones in touch with the lady leasing the condo to us (they were the ones who signed the paperwork), so it was their decision as well and they preferred making it official with the landlady, rather than having Catherine unofficially subleasing under us. That took a bit of time, but everything is settled now.

In addition to helping Catherine out, I think it’ll be a good thing because rent is even cheaper with an additional person, and I really like her (we were already friends) so I think we’ll have fun.

After Catherine moved in (not much stuff to bring in since her car is a small two-seater and she could only fit so much stuff), we went out to lunch at.a brewery and went grocery shopping at Trader Joe’s while she was buzzed haha (I was DD ). Later in the evening I went out to dinner with the entire apartment (Pauline, her husband, Catherine). Hopefully this is the beginning of a smooth quarter with everyone.

I’ve never had a moment in my life where I actively blocked someone from my social media AND blocked their number from my phone. To augment this point, I didn’t even know how to block someone on my phone and asked some friends how to do that. (I found out that it’s a very simple process of tapping a few buttons.) (By the way, does anyone know what the blocked person experiences when they try to call you?)

It all started a few years ago at work. I was training a patient how to insert and remove contact lenses, who happened to be a student at the same college I graduated from. I was ridiculously nice and patient with her, especially since it took maybe 2 frustrating hours to train the girl. Since I find it pretty easy to relate to students from my alma mater, I was very friendly with her. I guess she really accepted my friendliness and jumped the gun by asking for my Facebook so that she could add me. I was a little put off by that, but thought, What the heck, and let her add me. I saw her a few times at work since she was still a patient, but never saw her outside of work. We exchanged messages on Facebook sometimes; the usual small talk. She even invited me to one of the events she hosted for her friends (I respectfully declined). I thought it was kind of sweet that she took interest in cultivating a friendship with me.

One day she wanted to set up a time to meet up and I agreed since I didn’t mind getting some tea & having a nice chat after a long day at work. I love making new friends, and I love people who make the initiative to meet up and not actually flake out on you.

It was perfectly normal at first as we caught up with each other and had interesting conversations. Finally, she told me about how excited she was to show me some videos that were about the company she worked for. LONG videos might I add. Maybe 20 minutes? I respectfully watched them – awkwardly on her phone with us sharing earphones – and grew increasingly tired & anxious. I may be in my mid-twenties, but after a long 9-5 day during what was supposed to be my vacation from optometry school, my back was killing me on that hard, holey, metal chair and I was really tired. She asked me what I thought about the videos, and truth be told, I thought the videos had no real direction and were too sensational. They were trying super hard to be meaningful and moving, when I could tell they were just a sales pitch for their company. I didn’t want to be rude, so I just said they were “interesting.”

She talked about how cool I was, and about how it’s awesome that I want to help people through optometry, and about how she wanted to team up with someone brilliant like me. How cool would it be to work together.

Next, we dived into her company’s notebook, which was full of flow charts, research studies*, and statistics about how they worked and how great they were. *I doubt these research studies were truly statistically significant and done properly without bias. The worst part about it, was that she kept trying to make it interactive. “What do you think about ____?” “What do you find most interesting about this?” It was getting increasingly harder for me to be fake and nice, when all I really thought about was how much bullshit (excuse my French) the whole thing was. Lol.

In the end, after ~2 hours of sitting on that damned metal chair in the middle of a shopping plaza, I straight up told her I wasn’t interested, I didn’t have time for this kind of thing, I was getting extremely tired after a long day of work, and it just wasn’t for me. I expected to leave at this point, but she insisted that I stay because she really wanted me to meet her friend who works with her. She had the nerve to make me wait for her friend to be available (“he must be in a business meeting”) so that we could Skype with him on her phone. I guess he is her higher up, and I guess she had scheduled for him to have a chat with me? I straight up told the guy I wasn’t interested and I think he could tell I was getting irritated so he ended the Skype chat pretty quickly (thank the lord).

I tried to keep my nice person face on and was very nice to her as I tried to haul ass far, far away from her so that I could finally go home and rest. “Yeah, yeah, sure, we should meet up sometime over lunch when I’m not so tired from work.”

In case you haven’t been able to tell from the title of this blog post, yes, she was trying to get me involved in a pyramid scheme. Clearly she didn’t call it that, and pitched her company as the most innovative and amazing thing ever, but I wasn’t born yesterday and it sounded exactly like a pyramid scheme.

In the year following our lovely meeting, she continued to message me on Facebook, text me, and call me just to see how I was doing. I thought to myself, okay, she’s just really friendly. As long as she doesn’t shove her pyramid scheme down my throat again, I’m okay with just talking to her. Eventually, I got really tired of it, so I stopped replying to her. And yet, she would send multiple messages and phone calls to me, despite having all previous ones unanswered.

The next step was to block her on Facebook. Maybe, she would realize that I had blocked her on Facebook, and she would subsequently stop texting and calling me and leaving me voicemails. Those messages were always about how excited she was to share something with me. Thanks, but no thanks. What do you know? The girl can’t take social cues or she’s super deep in her pyramid scheme and is getting desperate, because she’s still calling me and leaving me voicemails. When she did that two days in a row and disturbed my car nap after a midterm, I called it quits and finally blocked her on my phone.

It’s funny because my boyfriend spotted the situation from miles away and told me from day 1 to cut her off, but I kept feeling bad about it and thought maybe she really did just want to me friends with me. I need to stop being such a nice sap.

I’ve had similar experiences where I was just too nice to refuse someone, and they used friendship to try to get their way. I’m getting too old for this and I think next time this sort of thing happens, I will have to work up the courage to just say, “Look, I’m not interested. I actually don’t appreciate that you’re disrespecting me by using our ‘friendship’ in order to waste my precious time for your benefit. Good day.” And scene.

Have you ever known anyone involved in a pyramid scheme or had someone try to get you into it? Crazy stuff.

When I was cleaning out my old blog posts, it was like a blast to the past with some of the memories I shared from over ten years ago (I can’t believe I’ve been blogging for that long!). Middle school and high school were more eventful than I remembered. Some memories that win honorable mentions:

There was a day in middle school where I had a total of 5 Cheez-its for lunch because I sat on a bench next to this group of guys I didn’t know, and had my slice of pizza stolen as I turned to the floor to grab something from my backpack. I still don’t know if it was my sister’s friend who sat with us or the group of guys who did it, but nobody ever gave it back to me. I was so hungry that day. Now that I think back, sheesh, how mean!

I also had a big fat crush on this guy who was probably confused at the time and ended up being gay. He moved onto high school while I was still in middle school. One day “he” messaged me on AIM to catch up (we had never messaged on AIM before) and talked for a bit, but at the end he said really stalkerish type things (like who I sit behind in math class, the teachers I had, etc.). He clearly shouldn’t have known these things because he was no longer at my middle school. That’s when I knew it had to be one of my classmates pretending to be him. LOL. Jesus, who thinks of doing these things? Middle school can be ridiculous. I think the guy who ended up playing that prank on me actually liked me and was taking advantage of the fact that I used to have a crush on the older guy who left for high school. You know, digging for any dirt. I should have been clued in when he asked me what I thought of some of my (male) classmates.

In freshman year of high school I had my first boyfriend. One of my friends from middle school wanted to separate him & me (aka have us break up by stealing him) and literally dubbed it her proud “Evil Plan.” The idiot boyfriend at the time was reveling in the attention from her and enjoyed flaunting it. “Oh you don’t know? Ask her what her Evil Plan is yourself,” he said proudly.

High school kids are silly. We start out embarrassingly stupid, even though we think we know everything and think our actions are solid. And then we blossom into adults who know that we actually know nothing. Haha.

I am a slave to the internet and I am known to check my email account (which updates automatically – go Gmail!) a lot of times per day. Checking emails and sending emails is not a problem at all. But sending emails to intimidating email recipients…is very nerve-wracking and it consumes so much of my time to just compose the letter and gather the courage to shakily hit that “send” button! (Whereafter I get uber jittery and unnecessarily wish there was an undo button for my school email account.)

I recently sent emails out inquiring about research opportunities at my university. It must have taken me a couple of hours to finish forming one email that I was confident (uhh, scratch that, barely comfortable is more like it. I mean, I re-read it like 10 times, copy and pasted it into Microsoft Word to check for any stupid errors I might have missed, and STILL felt reluctant to send it) enough in sending off.

When I got a few responses from a professor and a few graduate students, it probably took me half an hour to form a short responding email back to them.

A lot of the time, writing is my favorite medium to communicate with people. But with people like professors and grad students (whom I would like to work for), I get so nervous about my writing. What if I write something stupid? What if I don’t come across as intellectual enough? Blah blah blah????

Anyway, I’m going to meet one of the grad students tomorrow to talk more about her project opening and the work she does. Nervous as heck, since this is the first time I’m really taking initiative to get involved in research. I need to brace myself for rejection, too. Ugh, been really busy with school lately. Been pretty good at finishing everything, but now my next goal is to be on top of things ahead of time so I can stop being so damn stressed all the time.