“You are too irrisistable.”

My limbs ache from dancing in heels. Even though I only stayed at the party until 12:30am, it took it’s toll on these legs that haven’t been to the gym since…well, it’s been a long time. It was a good party though. The Vegas theme didn’t really come through (hey slutty girls, Playboy bunnies are from SoCal, not Vegas), but the fog machines and lasers made up for it. The combination of alcohol and masking smoke creates a dangerously disinhibited delerium.

I think the allure of these parties is not just the booze and socializing (which is fun, of course), but it’s also an opportunity to get your ego refreshed. Dress up, imbibe, talk, flirt, dance. And after I’ve had my fun, before the party dies down, before anybody gets cranky or throws up, I’m out of there. Sauntering barefoot through the streets, enjoying the feeling of pavement through my aching feet and the warmness in my blood, I walk the three blocks to Kenny’s and fall asleep curled together.

—————

A sharp turn of subject: I found out today that I unnecessarily took Intro to Psych over the summer because my AP credit covered the course already. So basically I wasted 6 weeks of time, effort, and a lot of my mother’s money. Times like these make me miss my mentor dearly.

You know the poetry unit of your English class is getting to you when you start noticing formal devices in your own writing. I am enjoying the poems we’re reading much more than I thought I would. I suffer disappointment during class when we only have time to discuss one or two of the poems. It might be a sense of curiosity more than anything. Usually I want to find out what the hell the poem is supposed to be about (“Daddy” – Sylvia Plath) or just what others think about it. I don’t think I would read poetry on my own though. It’s not the intake of the poems that I like so much as the discussion with my class and the teacher. Without them, I lose incentive.

Women
by Alice Walker

They were women then

My mama’s generation

Husky of voice – Stout of Step

With fists as well as

Hands

How they battered down

Doors

And ironed

Starched white

Shirts

How they led

Armies

Headragged Generals

Across mined

Fields

Booby-trapped

Ditches

To discover books

Desks

A place for us

How they knew what we

Must Know

Without knowing a page

Of it

Themselves.

extra ordinary

Earlier, I started a post because I was in the mood to write something, for once, but couldn’t really think of any content. Which is kind of pointless anyway since this blog was never big on the content. I got sidetracked and started reading Mattan’s blog that I found via Teresa. I’ve only read a few entries so far, but it’s enough to overwhelm me with a such a sense of incompetency that it makes me cringe to think that someone is going to read this or anything about my sad little life.

I thought about him today actually, before I even knew he had a blog. I was trudging back under the LA sun and for some reason I thought of this activity we did back in third grade. The teacher read us the story of The Big Orange Splot and then had us make our own creations out of orange splotches. I was partnered with Mattan and we decided that our blob kinda looked like a dog’s head so we wrote a story about Snappy the terrier and his adventures. I begrudgingly let him take the painting home. Now he’s traversing South America with not much more than a motorcycle.

When I think about the people I admire, I find that they are often the survivors of less than perfect homes, families, and circumstances. I’m not saying one causes another, as if misfortune automatically breeds genius, but I think there is something that makes a difference. Those experiences change your attitudes and outlooks. My own ideal life has not provided any real tests to my mettle.

Kenny’s right when he says I’m just another statistic, another premed Asian. At first I found it offensive, but there’s nothing actually negative in that description. The tone is a little derogatory, but what’s wrong with being a premed Asian? Being ordinary is not a failure. It’s not the same as wasting potential (which I also need to work on). Maybe it’s even something to be thankful for. Simplicity is hard to come by these days.

you’re all i ever needed

I’m so glad I have a premade “angry” playlist. There’s nothing more infuriating than having to remember and search for a song with fierce vocals and a heavy bassline when you can’t think straight. It’s aptly named “I Feel Statements”, which, for those of you who haven’t taken any counseling classes, is a strategy you use to increase understanding and communication, especially in arguments.

It really does work though, if only by making stop to think about what you’re going to say instead of just screaming shit like “You never fucking listen!” and “Like you’re so perfect, you whiny bitch”. Okay, only one of those things was said.

But, I feel better now because me and my roommate just spent 10 minutes trying to learn the dance moves from ‘I Want You Back’. It’s harder than it seems.

finishing what i started

I used to read rather fervently, staying up late to finish novels in bed. Then, for years, I read nothing at all, barely sparknoting classics for class. And now I am starting to read again, but I keep jumping around. All of a sudden I have a huge booklist of reads and I’m feeling confused and obligated in all kinds of directions.

Currently:
I am restarting The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. I read more than 2/3 of the book but then the owner wanted it back. After the conversation with the Toothless Intellectual, I wanted to restart and finish it. Now I find myself reading it critically, looking for themes in confinement, age, and sex. Is this how smart people read?
Winesberg, Ohio. I started this because I had nothing better to do at Kenny’s house. Despite being a small collection of short stories, I have to put the book down after each one and just think about what I just read. Quite heavy for such an unassuming looking novella.
The Stainless Steel Rat. This is my roommate’s favorite book of all time. I don’t know why I stopped reading it. I think the science fiction aspect of it turned me off even though it was enjoyable. I will finish this after the previous two books.

When, if ever, I finish these three books, I will read Infinite Jest and either Death Comes for the Archbishop or My Antonia by Willa Cather. Maybe A Modern Instance, too, since I have it already. And some more Toni Morrison. Oh god, I’m getting way ahead of myself.

—————

The relationships around have been very timultuous this year. It’s interesting, if not enlightening or horrifying, to see how the depths of personality are revealed in contests of love, lust, and loss.

the downward spiral continues

If bad things do come in threes, I hope this morning was the last of the trifecta. It’s all I can handle for a while. After being evacuated while I was taking a shower and getting a C in microbiology, I took the Chinese placement exam this morning to see if I can pass into the 6 series. Basically I wowed my interviewer with my inability to write an essay without missing words that infected the page like smallpox and to explain why I wanted to learn Chinese in Chinese.

It’s so frustrating. I’m usually confident about interviews, but the language barrier tore me to shreds. Instead of saying “I want to learn Chinese because not only is it an important part of my heritage and identity, China is a rising superpower and mastery of Mandarin will be extremely helpful no matter what field I go into”, I stuttered out some elementary sentence about how I haven’t practiced it in a while (obviously) and that I think it is important.

There is no greater sense of shame than having someone of your culture look at you with pity and seeing these long, beautiful essays the Caucasian students have written.

After the test, I went to the sculpture garden to cry because sitting by yourself and crying is way cooler than crying while walking. So while I was sitting there, this hippie-ish guy with about 5 teeth left sat across the inlet from me and asked me, “Are you Chinese?” I almost answered, “I don’t deserve to be.” But, we soon got into a very interesting conversation about American society and literature. I’m really very poorly read.

“American society is schizophrenic.”

a room with a view

A new schoolyear has begun. I don’t know if it’s just been a while or maybe it’s just the contrast to the relative stillness of summer, but everything seems so lively and exciting. The freshmen energy is rubbing off on my dusty 3rd-year heart. It helps that I actually like my RA and floor, which is pretty much a first for me.

I moved in on Sunday and quickly learned to appreciate the heightened aesthetics of a newly remodeled dorm. It really resembles a hotel with the mahoghany toned wood and soft hallway lighting. The most obvious improvement is in the bathroom. Marble sinks with shiny, automatic toilets. I really like the glass tiles and frosted dividers in the showers.

While I was enjoying these sparkly, pretty new showers, someone decided to maliciously pull the fire alarm. I was ready to trudge down seven flights of stairs in my towel, but Kenny had the foresight to bring me some clothes to change into. We ended up just hightailing it to his place for the night.

Blahblah, life recap. I’m too tired to do anything besides regurgitate my day. Here goes: training, bonding, bbq, all hall meeting, floor government, awesome games of mafia. Chinese intermediate placement test in 7 hours. God, it’s going to suck.

In other news, yours truly is starting to become a C student. Fuck.

family matters

Yesterday was much more of a family day. I pretty much stayed home and ate all the food my grandmother pushed at me. Third Aunt came over with her kids for lunch and my mom’s cousin visited with her new baby, as well. Kids are so cute, but I don’t really like playing with them very much. My littlest cousin has pointy elf ears.

My grandfather on my dad’s side wrote a memoir a little while ago and, I think, this inspired my maternal grandpa to write his own. He has about 150 pages of painstakingly neatly written Chinese cursive, all on the backs of used computer paper of course. I love just looking at them, if only because my illiteracy forces me to interpret them more as art than literature.

My job was to help him scan the pictures and text so that he could bring it to China without worrying about losing the originals. I love old photographs. They are so different from the ones we take today. The pictures are more like cardstock, rigid squares featuring rigid people. Nothing like the lively blurs that plaster my Facebook. Texture versus movement.

I wonder what I will still remember about my life 60 years from now. I’ve already forgotten so many details and events that seemed so important at the time.

i get love in the bay

I am sitting at my kitchen counter, eating an almond Haagen-Dazs bar, watching the beastliness that is Man vs. Wild with my brother. I love being home.

end of quarter evals

I need to seriously reassess my life.

Career/Academics

Besides fleeting desires to be an artist/zookeeper when I was about 4 years old, I’ve pretty much wanted to be a doctor. It never really occurred to me that I couldn’t do it or maybe that I wasn’t fit for this role. The only thing I could foresee stopping me was my own laziness (which is a very very big roadblock). But after doing badly on yet another final, I’m starting to think that the issue is not that I do not apply myself enough, but that I may never change. Procrastination and academic apathy have plagued me since elementary school and while I’ve been able to pull through somewhat well up until college, there are no weighted GPAs and extra credit assignments to really boist me up anymore. My resolve to really focus and study and generally be a good student only follow stretches of slacking off punctuated by failed tests and bad papers. Today is no different. I’ve said this a million times before, but it’s really time for me to get my act together. If this next quarter is just another blase repeat of all the other disappointments, I am going to have to start looking at graduate nursing programs instead of medical schools. It’s a great alternative, but kind of hard to accept as a reality when I’ve been headed in a certain direction so long.

Relationship

The ups and downs as usual. I sense a pattern in our dynamic. Things are okay and then they kind of spiral downward a bit, we have some utterly depressing conversation about how doomed our relationship is and the glaring flaws we have as people. This conversation, ironically, will respark whatever intimacy we’ve lost in the last couple weeks and things are renewed. Seems to be a potentially dangerous cycle, but it’s worked so far.

Friendship

I think I made a real friend this summer. It seems lame to say, but I haven’t really made any new friends that I can actually have personal conversations with since…early highschool, I guess. Commnication with an old friend has been going well and a reunion of sorts will be in order when I go home. I wonder how the transition from e-mails to real life will be.

Food

Yes, food gets its own category. I may have personal freedom here (not that my personal freedom is restricted at home…at all), but going home to the Bay Area means escape from epicurial bondage. Crawfish, pearl milk tea, pho, pig intestine, broccoli, green beans, dim sum. Bring it on.

I am spending more than I earn. Bad news.

swallowed in the sea

I was going to blog about happiness since that’s what we’ve been discussing in Psych 10, but I’m not in the mood seeing as I just found out I failed my last midterm. Insert failure rant. 

I also fell asleep during the psychology research experiment I was participating in. Hope I didn’t ruin the researcher’s results. 

At least it’s Friday and it’s my last day at the radiology internship. I’m glad that it’s over. I did learn quite a bit though, when I think about it. I learned how hospital exam scheduling works and just administration side of things. Also learned that I definitely don’t want to work on this end of the health field. I don’t think I can deal with desk job. I don’t know how my mom does it, 9-5 everyday in a (messy) cubicle. I would go insane. 

I was thinking about alternative jobs that other day, upon realizing that I can’t stand a desk job, and I couldn’t really think of anything I’d be interested in/qualified for besides physician/nurse. I mean, I definitely enjoy reading things about design, fashion, and cosmetics, but I don’t see a career in that. I’m a psychobio major who doesn’t like writing. Maybe I’ll fulfill my father’s dream of my becoming some kind of painter/potter/glassblower and then he’ll manage my shop for me. Yeah, psychobio doesn’t quite apply to that either. 

My thumb is callused from playing Soul Caliber 4.