Karen, Brian

2013-08-06 - Tuesday - Mom Facebook messaged me: "Karen and Brian and some of his family are coming to visit on Friday. Pray for me; and I hope Larry has time and energy that day. Playlist???" I must have said something about a playlist.

Jesus is God

2013-08-07 - Wednesday - Theological Facebook Debate - Original Oatmeal Joey Arnold vs Mehdi BenKahla - the debate is from Monday, the 15th of July, 2013. It continued to the 17th and 18th. I posted the debate on my Blogspot in August.

Getting Paid

2013-08-08 - Thursday - 09:07 PM - I emailed New Star: "I got your text. Can I come before 1 PM? ill Ne Star be open until 1 PM? It is 11 AM. You told me to pick up my money today before 11 AM. It is 11 AM now. I can come tomorrow. I can come another day. I can get there today before 1 PM." - 10:08 PM - New Star Hong Le replied: "Not today. Tomorrow morning from 8 am to 11 am. Thanks - Sent from my ASUS Fonepad."

Reunion

2013-08-09 - Friday - Mom's siblings, Karen & Brian, probably visited Mom. New Star told me to come in on this between 08:00 - 11:00 AM ICT.

Nicholas Little John

2013-08-11 - Sunday - 04:27 PM - Nick commented on a link I was tagged in on Facebook: "Joey is pretty awesome. I am hanging out with a great CHinese woman, maybe we will make it over to your neck of the woods one day. I think you both would get along, she is like you and went to Stanford, I'm proud of her. How have you been?" 10:47 PM: Le Quoc Tien: "i'm sorry. it's heavy rainning then i can not come drink & talk coffee... i hope see you on next time..."

Mother

2013-08-12 - Monday - 09:50 AM - Mom commented on a link I was tagged in on Facebook: "But you still have a mother."

Police Fined My Landlord

2013-08-13 - Tuesday - Saigon Time - Police Fined My Landlord - 400.000 VND ($20 USD).

Bags For Moving

2013-08-15 - Thursday - 10:47 PM - I emailed FYG Joseph: "I have 8 bags. One is a big suitcase. One guitar bag. Others are computer bags and two back packs. One plastic sack with a basketball in it."

Moved to Tan Binh

2013-08-15 - Thursday - Saigon Time - Moving to Tan Binh - Me: "I found a room. I will share a room with a college student for about 700,000 VND a month. Well, I will give my passport to the house owner today. The owner will talk to the police about me. The owner will show the police my passport. The owner may ask the police about the license thing. I do not know if the owner has a license or not. We will see what will happen."

Stress

2013-08-16 - Friday - 12:28 AM - I wrote on my Facebook: "I am pulling hair off my head."

Cambodia

2013-08-17 - Saturday - 04:17 AM - Laura Loi Nguyen commented on my Facebook status: "enjoy your summer trip in cambodia." Con Vịt Phương Thanh of Hanoi messaged me on Facebook: "I feel happy because of that... I haven't visited to Ho Chi Minh city, I hope one day I can get there and other country around the world.... Do you plan to Cambodia? when?... and why do you come there? to get a job or just a tour?" Going to Cambodia - Me: "Saturday, I go to Cambodia on a bus for 400,000 VND at 7 AM. I will get to Cambodia in the afternoon. I will hop on another bus around 3 PM and go back to HCM. I will get a new border stamp at the Vietnam/Cambodia border that will be stamped into my 10-year-long apx. 4,000,000 VND passport book which will save me money. I got my first ever passport August 2012. My airplane (almost 20,000,000 VND for the plane ticket) landed in Hanoi, Vietnam on Thursday: the 29th of November 2012. Came to Vietnam (to work teaching English) with a 3-months multiple-entry Tourist Visa. Went to HCM on Sunday, the 10th of February 2013. When I was extending my visa in HCM, since my visa was going to expire on Friday (the 22nd of February 2013), it cost more money because of my border stamp was of northern Vietnam while I was extending in southern Vietnam (HCM). It will cost less money to make visas and extend visas if you make the visa or extend the visa closer to where your border stamp was stamped at. If your border stamp says northern Vietnam, then you can save money when extending your visa if you extend your visa in northern Vietnam as well. If your border stamp says northern Vietnam, and you go to extend your visa in southern Vietnam, it will cost you more money to extend your visa on the opposite ends of Vietnam, for whatever the reasons. To the best of my knowledge, everything I am writing is as true and as accurate as my nose is real. Joey Arnold: The Original Oatmeal."

Hunting Rooms

2013-08-18 - Sunday - 05:34 AM - Shared Rooms - Let's Make a Deal - Couch Surfing - Me: " I am sharing a room. I am paying 700,000 VND per month to share a room with a 22 year old Vietnamese man in district Tan Binh, HCM. However, I am interested in finding a better place. If you are interested in sharing a room, we could work out a deal. We could find a larger room or house. We could all save money this way. Do you want to rent a room? Do you want to share a room? It could be me and you. We could split the cost. You can meet me at a café and we can talk about the details. We could split the cost in third. Have 3 people in one room or house. We could live in any district. I am looking for shared rooms for rent or cheap private rooms for rent. I am just looking for the best room at the cheapest price. Please find me on Facebook and talk to me there if you want to be my friend. I am very flexible. I am willing to live anywhere. We could have 5 people in one room and split the rent cost 5 ways. That could save us money. Just look up my name to find me on the internet. Joey Arnold, the Original Oatmeal. I am always room hunting. I always want to surf the market to see what kind of deals are out there. Please share any information if you ever come across any. Thank you in advance."

Cambodia

2013-08-19 - Monday - 08:04 AM - In an email chat with Joy Sanchez, I wrote: "I went to Cambodia.... janice wanted me to go with her a while back but i didn't go then but did go now for a border stamp and visa for my passport.... Janice asked me like a day before she went to Cambodia and I was not ready to go yet at that time.... because I was going to talk to a a guy I trust at a travel agency first... i do not have a job and i may run out of money in a few weeks..." Joy: "where are you staying at?" I replied: "a shared $35/mo room... my old room was $135... might be saving about $100 per month, now... I could pay a motor-bike driver to drive me around for about $150 per month... but i bought a bicycle for about $150 and do not have to pay somebody $150 per month... i sleep on a hard floor with a small blanket and pillow, and hand wash my clothes, and cold showers... our room is on the 4th floor and there is only one bath room and shower on the first floor..." Joy: "u have no plans of goin back to the US?" Me: "No... too expensive, time consuming... i have to have a very good reason to return... i have no vital reason to return... it is more important to go to other countries and to help and the USA does not need me as much as other countries need me... and the money for the plane could go to better uses like to pay for my food and rent... because i may run out of money in a few weeks... and if i had money for a plane ticket, i would use that money to keep myself alive..." Joy: "please pray for me... I will have my job interview next week for Japan... I really need a decent and stable job. I want to have my own house... And when I have it, I can invite you to come over..." Me: "i am praying... great... and that is good for your 2 daughters..."

Binh Thanh House

2013-08-20 - Tuesday - 03:54 AM - I emailed FYG Joo: "Mr. Hoang is the man who lived in the house I was living at in district Binh Thanh."

District 12

2013-08-21 - Wednesday - 01:49 AM - Rick Nguyễn Hung Nguyen - He commented on my Facebook status: "Me... if u want live at district 12... Do you live live alone or live with me. because i live alone... if you want live with me you must pay 500.000 vnđ / month ($25 USD).... why you need a license... of course, the owner has a license..." I eventually went on to live with him for about a month.

Kangaroo English Club

2013-08-21 - Wednesday - 05:02 AM - Kangaroo English Club - Facebook - Hoàng Chôm Chôm - Page - Craig Stephens replied to my email: "Dear Joey, Thanks for your inquiry. Unfortunately, at this time we do not have any vacancies for Native speaking teachers. Enjoy your time in Vietnam. Craig Stephens: Director: KANGAROO ENGLISH CLUB: Linh Trung. Thu Duc. HCMC. Vietnam." 03:15 AM: Was also rejected from ILA.

Cheated

2013-08-21 - Wednesday - 10:24 AM - Scammed - Hoangvi Lieu - two hours earlier: Hang Vi Lieu: "its super easy to cheat some one, SURE! Just put some dumb things like "LOL, some smileys" at the end of ur sms! Tell whatever u want from ur deeply heart and then plus LOL, :)), haha,... ur safe! I bet u and I have done." Me: "I gave a Vietnamese woman 4,000,000 VND back in June 2013, and she promised to pay me back. I sent it to her bank. She lives in Hanoi. She has not repaid me yet and she blocked me on Facebook. I am not sure if she cheated me or if she wants to pay me back someday if she can." Rookie Raw - "dude !!! u got played period !!! sending money to strangers is never wise,live and learn mate,got loads of scams out here." Hoang - "hmm I didnt mention abt money and stupid things related to Money here, guys! btw its not my business. cheers." Rookie - "lol,i dont know why original oatmeal was sharing that story either. yo yo !!!" Me - "Money is related to cheating. The topic is about cheating. It is easy to cheat. It is easy to cheat with dumb things like smileys. It is easy to cheat with things, people, situations, with all sorts of things. It is easy to cheat the truth via lying. It is also easy to cheat with money, honesty, integrity. Things are connected. Unfortunately, most people are too shallow to see the webs that connects everything with everything else. This universe is both simple and very complex. People may not understand why I do what I do. People may not always understand why I share certain things. They may not always see the connections or relevance of certain things, with what I try to say, but that does not absolutely and directly and always proof that those things are not there at all. Hoangvi Lieu wrote the word "CHEAT." That word made me think about a story where a girl "CHEATED" with me by stealing my money. You can use that one word, "CHEAT," to talk about so many things involving injustice, depravity, deterioration, derailment, honesty, truth, lying, stealing, short-cuts, integrity, character, crimes, murder, taking, and even apathy." Rookie - "wahhhh, oatmeal noi nhieu nhieu i think if i disturb your sleep master lady vivi ,reading that u can ngu." Hoang - "its ok Orginal! i know what u mean and just hope that ur money comes back to you soon! everything always hv the reasons! good luck, u can learn from it like a life lessons! goodnight all." Me - "As we continue to learn from the past as oppose to dwelling in the past, may we also laugh and shrug things off as well. For example, today, when I was getting off my bicycle as I was going to sleep at a hotel, I kind of accidentally kicked a guy on his motor-bike as he was passing by the Kim's Place Hotel in district 1 near Pham Ngu Laos. I shrivelled in embarrassed humility, followed with held-in shock and some kind of smile was trying to come out of me because I kind of thought it was funny that I kind of kicked a man, even through others saw me. In life, we should not smile too much and we should not be too crazy, but at the same time, we should not be too serious and we can laugh and smile at the mistakes we make in life." 11:11 PM: Nguyen Uyen - "you can find it only with 5000VND, not too much :v."

Talk So Much

2013-08-23 - Friday - 07:10 PM - Anh Le asked me on Facebook: "Why u can talk a lot?" 02:26 AM: Le Quoc Tien - "i came to wiki coffee yesterday but did not see you." The cafe near Tan Phu New Star that I would normally go to. 08:37 PM - "i work at the morning, how about evening at 5 pm?"

Jobless & Homeless

2013-08-27 - Tuesday - 03:17 AM: Share a Room with a Male English Teacher - 03:27 AM: Jobless & Stuck in Vietnam - Couchsurfing Thread - Mea Omnia - Me: " I've been teaching English in Vietnam for the past 9 months since November 2012. However, I've only been volunteering for the past 2 months of July and August 2013. I do not have certain college degrees and teaching certificates (TEFL, TESOL, etc), which means I am not qualified for any teaching job at all. If you want to talk to me, google my name, Joey Arnold, The Original Oatmeal. I am stuck in Vietnam. I do not have enough money to return to the USA. I am running out of money. Are you in need of an English Teacher, Tutor, Web Designer, Video Editor, Actor, Director, Designer, Writer, Artist, Inventor, Counselor, etc. I am living in a shared room in district 12 for five hundred VND a month. I do not know if I can stay there. If the owner doesn't have a license, then the police may kick me out again for the third time, like they did in my rooms in Tan Binh and Binh Thanh. Feel free to find me and talk to me. I am even on Youtube." 06:59 AM: Chua La Rick Thành Hưng, Joey & 2 Girls Picture: Chờ có vậy thui — with Thu Hien, Sarah Lam, ThuThao Nguyen and Binh Lee. 11:59 PM: Tan Tran - "The new school year started. Most of the schools that we are working with started last Mon - 19 August, 2013. How strange when they don't reply to you! Hope that they will contact you soon!" 12:04 AM, the 28th: "There might be some cases that they need a native teacher when they fixed the schedule for other subjects so that they won't change schedule later. You need to ask them to confirm if they can offer classes for you in the new school year or you'll have to look for other places to work. Maybe you can look for part time job and wait for the classes there. :-)" I was probably talking about how Tan Van broke my work contract. They basically fired me without saying that they fired me. I would have been happier with them being more direct.

Mea Omnia

2013-08-28 - Wednesday - 01:18 AM - I emailed Brent Groth: "We had our posts on the home page of our site, http://MeaOmnia.com. This may have been around November 2012. I would have the latest posts show up on our front page, as in our home page, as in the page you get when you type in http://MeaOmnia.com. I prefer one Blog Post on the Home Page or Per Page. You want to ask me about the Old Home Page. We can call that the Omnia Page. You originally wanted to call it the Empire Page last year, in 2012. Tell me what it should be called. You added photos and videos to this page. You were in it a few minutes ago. I tried going into it but you were in the home page. It makes the home page load slower. I plan to rename the home page the Omnia page." 10:13 AM: Brent: "Omnia is fine, or Omni, either one for now. I did notice the slower speed of the site when there are two users working at once. This is a problem. We don't don't want to be tug and pulling over work. So hopefully that was just at that time, and that there will be windows where time can be just used by either of us." 05:53 PM: me: "Remember how slow our Shared server with GoDaddy for web hosting was?" 06:32 PM: Brent: "Very slow, very slow. But dedicated, there was a ton of management, and the site was always breaking, and we were doing work that experts are doing, and I am no expert, I don't know about you?" 02:02 PM: me: "Yes, ok thank you for the clarification. Having the site run slow, or having it break was also a problem in the past as well. We have to experiment getting everything to jive as best as possible. Bing and Google usually alway load fast. We want their speeds." 11:17 PM: me: "But remember that our site MeaOmnia.com broke Wednesday too. I am not jsut saying that our site use to break in the past, back earlier in 2013 and 2012. The site broke itself. That is something you need to understand. When I say the site broke itself, I am not totally sure what that means except that it means what it said, that there was network problems. If you see our site break, you can tell me, try to fix it, show me the error logs and any information that can help, but sometimes our site may fix itself which means do not always panic." 10:07 PM: Loan Nguyen of Tan Van messaged me on Facebook: "Sorry, i think you should solve your problem by yourself. Because no one solves it better than yrself. Good luck to u!" That came after I asked her to talk to Tan Van who broke my employment contract without notice.

Mea Omnia

2013-08-29 - Thursday - 12:42 AM - I emailed Brent Groth: "Our site broke yesterday for about 3 minutes around 4 PM my time, Wednesday, the 28th of August 2013. I was editing the theme. I undid the code changes but that did not fix our site. I waited for a few minutes and our site started working again. I did not break the site. I think Shared was going slow and was having their own network problems. Even Facebook, Youtube, Google, Tagged, and all other websites run into these problems at times."

Mea Omnia

2013-08-30 - Friday - 07:37 PM: Brent: "Will do. I think it is wise to have the site be as entertaining as possible. This is the point. Like I've mentioned in recent emails, I think the strategy is not to download as many widgets, plugins, themes as possible, but to rather download ones that are useful, and ones that we think we are going to use. So when downloading one. test it, us it, see it. If it doesn't work, delete it, if it doesn't seem to be good enough, delete it. It's like filling your refrigerator. New food on the shelves is great, but if it sits there for awhile without being used, it's maybe not a food that is liked enough to be eaten first, and it will have to be thrown out. We want the freshest food on the shelves, and throw out, or don't even buy the food we don't like in the first place. We don't want to have to manage food that will not be eaten, or go bad if not eaten in time. So let's try a few themes at a time, and keep them, and interchange them, but downloading hundred is unnecessary. Also, plugins as well. We are making some changes on the home page. It would be nice to kind of make subpages look different than the home page, and figure out how subpages will look." 10:34 PM: me: "How much food can we fit in our fridge?" 10:52 PM: Brent: "As much as we want. But if it is not eaten or updated with newer food, it may go bad. We want the freshest newest food, and to replace with better food if the older food goes bad." 11:25 PM: me: "It is kind of hard to build a website (MeaOmnia.com) of the best of everything without having and using everything." 11:29 PM: Brent: "Ok, we'll use everything. Let's keep rolling, I won't challenge you on this part if you think it is best to use everything." 11:40 AM: Mom: "having a TESOL certificate might help... don't give up, Joey Arnold."