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Archive for life thoughts
June 9, 2006 at 12:03 am · Filed under life thoughts
I took Myers Briggs when I was 18, and came out as ISTJ, which seemed to fit as best as Myers Briggs goes in terms of being an introverted, logic-oriented engineer. I took it again recently, and I came out ENFJ. So aside from having remained as “judging” (read: judgmental?), I am the complete opposite of what I was 6 years ago. How does that make any sense?
The funny thing is that I googled “Myers Briggs” and ended up at a site where one can score one-self as I vs. E, S v. N, F vs. T, or J vs. P. Following the descriptions of each letter, I picked myself to be … ISTJ, exactly what I tested for when younger. So the question is then do I erroneously categorize my personality because I THINK that I am a certain way? But in reality (ie, when given scenarios), my actions actually point to a different personality?
That is all too much for me to think about right now. If you are curious about your own four letters, take the test yourself. (Original link courtesy of Paula :)
May 14, 2006 at 2:16 pm · Filed under life thoughts
It has been raining for almost a week now and will continue into next week. The pitter patter wakes me up at night sometimes, but I fall right back asleep because of the warmth and comfort surrounding me. The rain reminds me of another place, another time.
I think back to this time last year, and the one thing that brought all those days together was the cold, drenching, dreary rain that fell for days and weeks and seemed to never go away. I remember the hopeless rain that fell as I sat in Logan Airport, across from the America West checkin counter in Terminal B, leaning on his shoulder, with wet blurry eyes and tears that fell and fell and would not go away. I remember taking the empty T back, wanting to cry myself to sleep, only to be met with day after day of being holed up in the Whitehead Institute library studying 14 hours a day for two weeks straight for those dreadful quals. The rain kept falling outside, splashing against the windows, drenching me as I biked home late at night, drizzling as I went for coffee breaks around the corner, pitter pattering against the window waking me up at night.
Those rains brought with them a dark period that extended all the way into November/December, a period so full of helplessness, frustration, and tears about every facet of life for me. I think back to the calm before the storm last summer, the happy times filled with sunshine and warmth and love, but consistently interlaced with doubt and pain and denial. I see the logical progression of how things came to be the way that they did, how sunny days grew stormy then became clear again, how love became anger became respect became resentment became acceptance, and how frustrations became a giant knot of life became a problem to be solved became finally untied. I see; I accept, but I don’t fully understand, not even now.
And now, here I am, facing another season of rains, and I realize just how much has changed between these last two seasons. I am in a different place in my life, a completely different mindset, a different time, surrounded by different people who have touched and changed my life. I marvel at how much of a transition this year has been, how much pain and uncertainly came with it, but also how much I have learned about myself and have grown into a (hopefully) stronger person.
I wonder what this new year between the rains will bring me?
May 7, 2006 at 2:57 pm · Filed under life thoughts
Lately, I have thought quite a bit about that old, cliched saying of whenever a door gets closed, a window of opportunity is opened somewhere else. I think a door closed last October that I never accepted fully until now. Something was always keeping the door slightly ajar, or else the spacing between the door and the ground always let in warmth and light. There were windows that opened that kept my mind off of what was behind that door, but it wasn’t until the right window opened that I finally shut the door completely.
March 15, 2006 at 12:34 am · Filed under life thoughts
As a part of the fate of my life, ie where I am “pre-destined’ to go, I feel that there are certain recurring themes that thread themselves through my life. It is hard to explain why something strikes a chord for being a “theme” while other recurring events are nothing special. I think the things I categorize as “themes” are things that repeatedly show up in unrelated events, unrelated people, and the things themselves seem utterly random.
So some “themes” that I have noticed over the years: the city of Pittsburgh, the country of Ireland, the language of Portuguese, the state of South Carolina (and not because I am from there), boys named Eric, and the number 10. These “themes” keep popping up in the people I meet, the places I go for vacation, for business, by chance, the way things end up … over and over, and over again.
Makes me wonder, what does it all mean?
March 7, 2006 at 12:27 am · Filed under life thoughts
… letting people down.
I have never been good at literary interpretation. I always struggled with the concept of stepping away from the details of a story to synthesize and garner the big picture abstract idea. Likewise, and not surprisingly, it took me until now to realize that I am the epitome of the boy-who-cried-wolf.
This stems from my general laziness and non-motivation to get things done. Thus, when I am asked about my progress, I highlight and exaggerate the challenges that I have been having, in order to show just how hard I have been trying, and how the lack of general progress is due to these great walls that I have not been able to scale. This works the first couple of times, but after a while, I think people catch on. My advisor, post-docs, other students … they come to realize that shan is the perpetual “girl-who-cries-wolf”.
It used to be that when I would mention a challenge, people would flock to my aid. They would help me generate code, think up experimental setup solutions, offer advice, etc. etc. thinking that I generally truly needed the help. However, in typical crying wolf fashion, I exhausted these other people’s goodwills. I think these people have all now realized that I never follow up on their suggestions/advice, and that I am just a lazy individual that does nothing. So they have given up on me and stopped coming to my side to help me.
I am also a very forgetful and absent-minded individual. I finally lost my cell phone today. I am actually quite surprised that it has taken me this long to finally lose my cell phone. Not that I was trying to lose it, but in general, I don’t keep track of things (keys, phones, watches, rings, etc.) very well. And so it happened tonight. And now I am phone-less. So don’t call my cell, and don’t text me, unless you are dying to play sleuth and help me to locate my phone by chewing out whoever happens to answer it when you call. This beg for your help is not coming from the “girl-who-cried-wolf.”
February 27, 2006 at 12:29 pm · Filed under life thoughts
Have I gone off the deep end? What does that even mean, to go off the deep end? Usually one would say that if there seems to be a general loss of control. I don’t feel out of control, or more rather I feel like maybe I am going a bit out of control, but I know exactly what I am doing. I am in control of my being out of control, whatever the hell that means. It was yet another crazy weekend, full of socializing/partying, but also plenty of introspection. In fact 7 hours worth of straight introspection. I think I found another rare, rare soul mate, the kind you meet maybe once every 3 or 4 years.
February 6, 2006 at 3:01 pm · Filed under life thoughts
jason: you are glitz addicted
jason: you don’t need any more sexy swu
me: oh but i do
jason: you are so sexy you’ve got more men than you can beat off
jason: hmm … bad choice of words
I think I want to be a doctor, but not just any kind of doctor. I want to be the kind of doctor with the most glitz-factor … like a surgeon, or better yet, a neuro-surgeon. I am drawn to that inexplicable/intangible factor of “sexiness” in a career/job/life more than the career/job/life itself (is this a double entendre that applies to my choice of men as well?). I was at a women’s workshop last year, and someone said something along the lines of yes, we are all driven people. If we don’t happen to channel that “driven-ness” into stressing ourselves out through our research, if we instead choose to be a stay-at-home-wife/gardener/mom, we would end up channeling that “driven-ness” into stressing ourselves out striving to be the best goddamn wife/gardener/mom there ever existed.
I think that sums me up pretty well, with the addition that I would stress myself out being not just the best wife/gardener/mom, but also the one with the most glamour and glitz. I don’t want to be just any good wife. I want to be Mrs. good-wife-CEO, the one whose annual black-tie fundraiser for kids with cancer is the rave of the upper echelon. I don’t want to be just any gardener, I want to be the one pruning Asian rose bushes in Cameron Diaz’s backyard, the same species of rose bushes that no one else can get to even bud in North America. In essence, I don’t really care so much about WHAT I do, I just want that which I do to have inexplicable/intangible sexiness.
With that said, allow me to apply this to my life currently. I have no desire to stress myself out being the best researcher there ever existed. I think about the possibility of being a glitzy and glamourous principle investigator, pushing the front of the front of the hottest research field, holding a professorship at Harvard, or MIT, or wherever else sexy. And you know what? These possibilities don’t excite me at all. I just plain don’t care. I don’t care about abstract science; I don’t find protein molecules sexy (unless they are in the form of toned forearms on a guy I’m admiring). I don’t really want to talk to the other big guns–no pun intended–in systems biology or computational biology or whatever else insert-buzz-word-here-biology. Even with the glitz inherently associated with being a world-renowned scientist, I shrug my shoulders, and I say … “eh, not for me”.
So I think this is a good indication that research isn’t my thing. It’s not what I want to do. Just say no to research. Despite being a glitz-driven person, I have no desire to climb to the top of the researcher/scientist ladder, knowing full well that there is just as much glitz and glamour atop that ladder as there is anywhere else, if not more.
Okay, so what? What do I think of all of this? What does this mean?
I don’t know. This is about as far as I have thought on this matter. I guess it’s all a part of being in my 20s and figuring out what I want to do. But really, seriously, being PTA president is pretty sexy. But not just any PTA president, but the PTA president who single-handedly rallied up parents and grandparents and neighbors to mount a successful campaign to increase educational spendings at the state legislature for public high schools in rural, backward, South Carolina. In turn, SC moved up 20 spots in average SAT scores by state.
January 5, 2006 at 5:35 pm · Filed under life thoughts, wahoowa
I was a Lawn Resident my fourth year at UVA. In fact, I was the Head Resident on the Lawn. What is the meaning of this, you ask? Did I sleep in a tent on a grassy knoll every night? No. Well, I must have had my own special chair, one of those high-back Adirondacks, on a courtyard, right? Wrong. Being “on the Lawn” meant that I lived in a matchbox single room with ancient electrical wiring. I walked outside to use the bathroom, even in the middle of the night (though some may choose to argue this point). During the winters, I tread through 4 inches of snow in my bathrobe and flipflops to get to the showers. When it wasn’t winter, I endured the embarrassment (or was it glory and pride?) of walking through high-traffic zones with wet, freshly-shampooed hair wearing my plush, terry-cloth robe, bought expressly for that purpose.
So what is this Lawn?
The Lawn is a pivotal concept without which undergraduate life at UVA would be worlds apart from what it is today. The Lawn pits students against each other extracurricularly from the moment they step on Grounds. It feuds a competition to see who can rack up the most credentials outside of the classroom while still keeping a decently high GPA. It plants seemingly life-or-death goals in students’ minds as they each strive to gain his/her peers’ highest ratings on the fuzzy criteria of “significant contributions to the University community.” All in the name of one letter, mailed from the housing office, that reads “Congratulations! You are one of 47 distinguished students selected to live on the Lawn.”
So, why do I bring this up now?
Recently, I was asked by a fellow 2004 Lawn resident to dig up information on a girl, our year, who claimed to have received a “congratulations” letter, but ultimately never lived on the Lawn because she turned down the offer before the school year began. My friend suspected that this girl was lying, but had no proof, so he checked with me, the Head Resident. The girl was lying.
As good little graduates of the University all know, lying is an Honor offense that leads to automatic expulsion. But what is the meaning of lying about the Lawn AFTER graduating? Or even better, what is the meaning of the Lawn itself after graduating?
In all honesty, the Lawn means nothing after UVA. Non-Virginians laugh and laugh about the idea of “sleeping in someone’s front yard”. Furthermore, the whole concept of intense extracurricular competition so engrained in us wahoos means about as much as German sausages to everyone else: foreign, and probably bad for your health when ingested in large quantities.
So what changed about the Lawn after we graduated that demoted it from “this means the whole world to me” to “this means nothing at all” in a mere year or two? The tiny rooms are still there, with its brick exteriors, cobwebs, and a different set of over-achieving residents inside.
So, why does it feel different?
It feels different because we have lost the context of the Lawn. Some meanings are universal, no doubt: lying means doing something wrong, or having a cold means not feeling so great for a few days. Most things, however, only have meanings in context. Honor is vague in the minds of most, but Honor means precisely “no lying, cheating, or stealing” to Virginia students and alums. NASA means the space agency to most Americans, but for a select group, it may mean the Native American Student Association. For just about everyone, the lawn is what you hire the neighbor’s son to mow, but the Lawn is the Holy Grail of achievements at UVA. How we interpret the context around us is important, as is finding the context for which our thoughts are even relevant. That seems obvious enough, no astrophysics degree needed here. (At this point, I’m almost tempted to launch into something on the Tipping Point’s third rule: Power of Context. But I shall refrain in the interest of length.)
So where am I going with this?
To generalize, and at the risk of sounding terribly obvious: we find the meanings for things around us in our surroundings. Most things lose their significance given a different context, which really should not come as a surprise. I think what I have failed to understand until very recently is how incredibly universal this idea is. (Oh the irony: the universality of specific context.) As my mother always says: 退一步，海阔天空。 Literally, it means to “take a step back, the sea and the sky are expansive”. Contexually, it means to take a step back, see the big picture. Taking a step back and seeing the big picture has made all the difference for me in 2005: helping me to go from “I am so f-ing miserable, I want another life” to “I can live with this; this really isn’t so bad.” The universal meanings are still there, and always will be: life goes on; but the contextual meanings are only what I make of them. Not everything can, or should, be trivialized, but just about everything can be contexualized so we can forgive ourselves a little more than we have been allowing ourselves to.
With that, here’s to 2006: the year of opportunities, of meanings, and when put into the right context: the year of the dog!
November 25, 2005 at 9:30 pm · Filed under life thoughts
My parents have completely transformed over the past few years. They are no longer strict parents, and are now really just loving people who care more about my welfare than anybody else.
A few examples:
1) When I was little, my parents constantly nagged me to not waste money. Don’t buy things for 52 cents if you can get it for 50. Now, they are more than happy to offer to buy me ridiculous things. Today, while out shopping, I pointed out a Coach bag that I really liked. My mom asked me how much I thought it cost … and I said probably $150 or $200. Her first reaction? If you want it, we’ll get it for you. Wow. Of course I said no … I felt guilty even wanting my parents to pay for something like that, almost as if I were trying to take advantage of their generosity. And now I am the one checking my buying habits and asking “Do I really need to spend that much money on a bag??”
2) I was really nervous before I told my parents about going to Ireland. I thought for sure that they would yell at me, say something like “why would you ever think to go to Ireland? Don’t you have research? School?” The reality … they didn’t object at all when I told them. They essentially said okay, call us before you leave, and call us after you get back. Have fun! Don’t forget your camera, and show us the pictures! Wow.
3) They have always, as long as I can remember, discouraged me from dating (don’t focus on boys, focus on schoolwork, don’t get too serious). Now I get dating talks. I got another one from my dad today, kinda cute, but also pretty awkward. He asked me, quite implyingly, what I thought of the guys in my department. I didn’t really know what to say, so I ended up trying to avoid the question and told him that since it’s grad school, lots of people are married anyway. His response? Oh okay, but you have to open your eyes wide, look all around you. Maybe this boy or that boy likes you, and you don’t even notice because you don’t give him the time of day. If you see someone you like, sometimes boys are clueless and they don’t realize it, and you have to give him some hints. WOW. I was speechless.
I guess I am glad that my parents so easily accepted my independence over the past few years. I am really thankful that they were able to let go and let me live my own life, unlike so many other obsessive Asian parents who can’t ever seem to let go. At the same time, though, I don’t think I’m quite ready yet to disclose to them the everyday details of my dating life!! Maybe they’re just worried about me …
November 23, 2005 at 12:48 am · Filed under the internet, life thoughts
Specifically on this blog:
1) My posts in here have gotten significantly more frequent.
2) Topics of posts have gotten increasingly more personal.
3) Readership has grown.
I have always said that what I post in here is for the amusement of anyone and everyone who happens to come across this piece of the web. For this reason, I never want people to feel guilty for reading this, regardless of whether or not I explicity know of your readership, or even whether or not I know you at all.
The readership having grown means that I am indeed amusing people, be it that they are laughing with me, or at me. I am glad about this. At the same time, however, I am a bit alarmed by the increasingly personal nature of this blog. I feel like it is an indication that I need an outlet of some kind for my thoughts, ideas, and laments; and I’m not confident that this is the right medium for it.
I do know that one of the best things about this blog is how it has come to influence my decision-making process. When something happens, or when thoughts start running through my head, I almost always consider the blog-worthiness of the event or of the thoughts. I don’t think about them in the sense that I actually expect to write or post about them. In fact, most of these things, I would never post, so perhaps more accurately, I think about HOW I would write about them if I were to blog them.
This process of pretend-writing an entry really helps me to think through things, in ways that I would have never been able to without this blog. It is amazing the conclusions and decisions I have been able to come to just by composing fake entries in my mind. It is almost as though the process of writing (or thinking of the rights words to write) helps me to put things around me in the perspective I need to understand not only the situations and thoughts themselves, but most importantly, to understand myself.
Thank you blog, and most of all, thank you everyone out there who care to entertain my thoughts.
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