conquering the world one oxymoron at a time
Archive for daily grind
November 22, 2006 at 2:37 am · Filed under daily grind
How do you go about losing a friend? I guess when neither person stays in touch, you grow apart. But some friendships last forever even after years of separation and no contact. If there are residual resentments and/or reservations, then the friendship is lost with loss of contact. But when good friends are such good friends, how can we even let small trivialities get in between us? Soulmates are meant to last forever, not 10 months.
I think I lost a friend. I’m pretty sure I lost a friend. Yet, I don’t really know how I could have acted differently to have retained the friendship. I felt like I was honest, though perhaps too much honesty can come to bite us in the end. But I think I can go to sleep at night knowing that I was as honest as I could have been, no more, no less. In the end, honesty should strengthen a strong relationship. Maybe ours just wasn’t all that strong of a friendship; it would have worked better as something else, but when that something else just wasn’t on the horizons, the friendship fell out from under as well.
November 17, 2006 at 12:58 am · Filed under daily grind
On the last day that YinYin was in town, we took the MIT shuttle to the T stop to go downtown, and a woman came onto the shuttle with a baby carriage and the cutest baby in the world laying in it. The baby couldn’t have been more than 6 months old, and it immediately made me think, “awww, I wish I had one.”
I was surprised when YinYin said to me a bit later, “yeah, remember that baby we saw on the shuttle? It made me wish that I had one.” I thought that only I think about how cute babies are and how much I want to have a baby (okay, not practical right now, but still; they’re cute). Is my biological clock somehow ticking like crazy that I gush at all babies and want to take tons of pictures of them whenever I see one?
Later that day, YinYin and I went on a Duck Tour around Boston. Behind us sat a 2 or 3 year old little girl. She was very adorable, and very cute, but she SCREAMED and SCREECHED and SHRIEKED the entire 80 minutes of the tour. At one point, YinYin and I both looked at each other and said the same thing. “God, I’m really glad now that I DON’T have one of those.”
Funny how our minds changed so fast :)
October 15, 2006 at 8:18 pm · Filed under daily grind
I left my laptop power supply at school yesterday, so I couldn’t do much work since my laptop’s battery no longer holds charge. This afternoon, I drive to school to pick up the power supply and remembered why I left it yesterday. I left it because it no longer worked. Thus began a transient state of panic as I realize that my proposal presentation only exists on my laptop, and I now have no way of retrieving it, and I need my laptop to do my presentation on Tuesday. Of all the times that the power supply would break down, why now? All it had to do was to hold out for two more days.
In the mail today, I got the annual report published by the scholarship I had at UVA, telling about what the current Scholars are up to, and what all the alumni are up to. Glancing through all the classes, there were two “In Memoriam” in total, both in the 2000s (the program started in the early 80s). One was for Dave; the other was for a guy whom I knew of, but I was never friends (or even acquaintances) with personally. Ironically, I knew of him through Mary, the girl who passed on word to me about Dave’s death this summer. I remember Mary saying that Jon was one of her best friends at UVA, right from the start when they’d knock on their adjoining dorm walls in Webb their first year. I tried to google some information on how he died, but everything I found simply said that he died in his home on February 6.
This made me wonder how Mary is doing. I haven’t really seen her since she graduated in 2001, nor have I talked to her much, yet she was such a defining person for me my first semester at college. I want to reach out to her, just to say hi, ask how she’s doing, how she’s holding up. To lose two dear friends in one year must be so tough, but I don’t know how to approach her. It’s been so long, and I don’t even know what I would say.
October 7, 2006 at 5:41 pm · Filed under daily grind
I do my share of splurging, but in general, I tend to save more than I spend. This has been helped by the general lucky course of life I’ve led (free to attend Governor’s School, scholarship to UVA, being GRT now so I don’t pay rent … etc etc). Essentially, ever since I was a junior in high school, I have been financially independent from my parents and have managed to save money from odd jobs (and now a steady grad school stipend), more than I’ve ever needed to spend. So I’ve started to wonder, just what good is this money anyway if all it does is sit in the bank collecting dust, which overshadows whatever measley interest I happen to get?
Some say I should invest, but I’m not investment savvy. Just the thought of investing gives me a headache. So what else is there to do with the money except to spend it? So the solution to this is that I will spend my money. I’ll leave some cushioning (just in case I fail my quals and get kicked out of school), but essentially, why not spend the rest?
So now the question is HOW to spend the money. Last summer, I bought a bike, which I guess was kind of practical. This year, I want to splurge big. I’m going to throw a huge party.
Yin Yin, Xijia, Vandna, and I are finally going to have our West Side reunion in November here in Boston. This will be the first time we’ve all seen each other, together, since 1996 when we were graduating 8th grade. Hence, there is no question that this reunion has absolutely got to be done in style. An additional motivation is my upcoming birthday. Since I’ll be in China for my actual birthday (Oct 28), I won’t really have a chance to celebrate with friends here.
So WL reunion + 24th birthday = HUGE bash. Details forthcoming, but the date is Friday, Nov 10. For those readers who are in Boston, save the date.
September 29, 2006 at 9:02 pm · Filed under daily grind
Someone seated next to me today asked me “Hey Shan, how’s everything?” I replied, “not so good.” He didn’t say anything further and went back to doing whatever it was that he was doing.
A few seconds go by, he asked, “Wait, what’s that you said?”
I changed my mind and replied, “Oh, just that things are fine.” He said, “Oh cool” and went back to his thing.
He made up his mind what I was going to say before he even asked me “how are you?” that he didn’t bother listening to my answer. Only when it didn’t quite sound like “okay” did he do a double take and wonder to himself, “wait, what did she say?” Once I gave him the answer that he was expecting, he nodded his head as if all the pieces had indeed fallen in place and went about his own business.
Why do we bother asking someone “how are you?” when we don’t really expect them to tell us how they REALLY are? Even when I’m feeling crappy, I always answer “pretty good, how are you?” when someone asks me how I’m doing. I do it out of habit; it’s an automatic response that I don’t even think about. What a worthless phrase. “How are you?”
Do you REALLY want to know?
September 14, 2006 at 1:20 pm · Filed under daily grind
Is September a popular month for parties? The current party count for this Saturday is at five. I don’t think I even have the time for one.
**EDIT** at 4pm: The count is now at 3; two got cancelled. Let’s have a couple more cancellations!
**Additional EDIT** at 9:20pm: Count for Saturday night is still 3, but now count for Friday night is also up to 3.
September 13, 2006 at 8:48 pm · Filed under daily grind
… in myself :O(
September 7, 2006 at 5:16 pm · Filed under daily grind
Procrastination is my specialty. For example, instead of reading papers right now and thinking about what I want to discuss with my advisor Sunday afternoon (yes, I am having a meeting with my advisor on Sunday), I am writing a blog entry. Why? Because it seemed much more appealing than reading papers.
Another example of my procrastination that is actually a really big pain right now (and which prompted me to write about): going to see the eye doctor.
About a year ago, I made an appointment with an eye doctor at MIT Medical for a routine yearly eye exam. However, somehow, not only did I not get a routine eye exam when I showed up for my appointment, I got talked into four follow-up sessions to get better-fitting contact lenses and was shoo-ed out of the office in under 30 minutes. When I left my original appointment, I asked the doc, “so, what about my eye exam?” His response was, “oh, don’t worry about that. We’ll get to it.”
Well, after two of the four follow-up sessions, I hated my eye doc so much that I vowed never to go back to see him again. So basically, in the ened, I used up the one yearly eye exam I am alotted by my insurance AND paid for four extra contact-lens fitting sessions (of which I only went to two), AND got nothing out of any of that, not even my originally scheduled annual eye exam where the doc flips through all those silly little discs of transparent plastic asking “Which one is clearer? Lens #458 or lens #459?”
Because of that, I never got a prescription written out for me for last year, which meant that I couldn’t buy new contacts unless I get another routine eye exam where the doctor actually does his job. Luckily for me though, my dad had bought me a whole bunch of boxes of contacts last summer. But what seemed like ample supply steadily diminished over the past year, and my last pair of contact lenses started deteriorating and irritating my eyes toward the end of last week, forcing me to throw them out.
I had, of course, realized that my contacts would run out at some point. On multiple occasions, I would think to myself “I should go and just pay out-of-pocket for another eye exam so I can get a prescription and make sure I can buy more contacts.”
This, however, I never did because I am an expert at procrastinating.
So as a result, I have had to wear my glasses for the past week or so, and I haven’t worn glasses since freshmen year of high school. The change in perspective from having corrective lenses right on my cornea to having corrective lenses AN INCH in front of my cornea is giving me a headache, literally. I feel like I am seeing cross-eyed all the time.
Not being able to procrastinate any longer, I made an appointment with an eye doc, a DIFFERENT one this time. Luckily, I don’t have to wait too long; the appointment is for next Tuesday morning. The first thing I’m going to do when I step out of that office with that piece of magical prescription paper is to buy me a box of contacts.
September 5, 2006 at 12:31 pm · Filed under daily grind
I volunteered to write an article for the the next issue of the Graduate Student New magazine a while ago, but that meant that I had to actually sit down and write something this past week. In typical fashion, serious writer’s block ensued, and whenever I struggle to write, I always think about George Gamow’s One, Two, Three … Infinity. It’s been a long while since I read the book, and I don’t remember much of it except this one thing that I always think of:
In one of the earlier chapters, Gamow mentions a machine that could theoretically output all sentences that have ever been written, as well as every sentence yet to be written. The machine resembles one of those combination locks that has a series of dials on them, except the dials on this machine have all 26 letters, 10 numbers, space, and a multitude of punctuation marks, and there are many many of these dials in a row. So in theory, the machine can just go through all the combinations of dial positions to make strings of characters. The vast majority of the strings would be gibberish (ie. “oajsmd928*9.asl\e”), but the sentences of the best written works would also be among the outputs. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
So theoretically as well, this machine could output sentences of the most ground-breaking scientific papers, or more importantly for my current state, it would be able to generate my entire thesis proposal for me, and/or have written that GSN article for me.
If only I had me such a machine.
August 14, 2006 at 2:34 am · Filed under daily grind
Some pictures: Yoni’s bday, Laura’s wedding
Yoni’s birthday thing was friday night at Umbria. All day Saturday, I played 5.25 ultimate games during the summer hat tournament. I had to leave early to drive to New Jersey for Laura’s wedding, which was so absolutely gorgeous and touching. Great fun all weekend long, but I am e-x-h-a-u-s-t-e-d, especially since this is the 6th weekend in a row that I have gone out of town. Time to take a breather before the kids come back to school. Summer’s almost over :(
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