conquering the world one oxymoron at a time
Archive for May, 2006
May 31, 2006 at 3:20 pm · Filed under daily grind
I wore my orange Virginia shirt today, and got a couple of “wow, is that a new shirt?” comments, including one from my advisor. This seems a rather odd coincidence … why would multiple people think that my shirt is new? Perhaps the orange too bright.
I also signed onto IM for the first time in a long time today. I think I just kinda forgot about IM for a while. It started because my laptop caught a virus (from an IM, ironically). Because of the virus, I disabled all of my internet connections. When I finally got my laptop online again a week later (after delaying the re-formatting process as long as I could), I forgot about IM. Maybe this is a sign that I am over my addiction.
Speaking of being over things … Ryan and I had been in email contact back and forth for a couple of weeks last month. His last email made me sad, and I had meant to write back (not to say that I was sad), but then I put it off and just never did it. That’s rather unusual as well. Sure I am flaky with email, but I have never been flaky with emailing Ryan.
My parents were up here in Boston for Memorial Day weekend. I forgot how much I missed them until they spent a few days here. I almost cried when I drove back from dropping them off at the airport (oh yeah, and they brought me a car!). They also met Jack, and the first thing my mom said to me when she met him (in Chinese, of course) is “oh my god, he is so amazingly handsome!” SCORE!
May 26, 2006 at 8:21 am · Filed under daily grind
I lost my cell phone … again, except this time I am not all that much at fault. I did leave it sitting on the steps of the student center, but only for a couple of minutes before I realized that I had left it. When I went back, it was gone. I called it; Jack called it; other people called the phone, never an answer. I talked to Verizon, and they told me that outgoing calls were being made from the phone, and a girl I know emailed me apologizing for having missed my call. Why would the person make those outgoing calls? Why would they call this particular girl? Why is MIT such a sucky place? Not to harp on UVA’s Honor Code any more, but this would have never happened at Virginia. You can call me naive or idealistic all you want, but I am absolutely certain that this would have NEVER happened at UVA. Honor just carries much more weight in students’ minds.
On top of this, my laptop caught a virus. A virus that Hector IMed me, no less. Me being my overly eager self thought, “oh look, Hector IMed a picture, how nice”, so I clicked on the link, and the rest is history. I realized it was a virus as soon as it happened, and I wanted to bang my head against the wall for how stupid I was. Because of the virus, Windows refused to boot up and I had to reformat and reinstall. Royal pain, but it did force me to reformat and clean up, which I have been meaning to do for a while.
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.
May 5, 2006 at 12:33 pm · Filed under current events, random
I am on the alumni directory for the Academic Magnet High School in Charleston, despite never graduating from there. An email was sent yesterday to the list about AMHS being #10 on Newsweek’s newest list of the 1200 top US high schools. I was very much pleasantly surprised; I didn’t know AMHS was THAT good. What surprised me MORE, however, was the notable absence of my actual alma mater, the SC Governor’s School for Science and Math, which also lacks a Wikipedia entry. On a list of the 1200 top US high schools, I would have definitely expected Governor’s School to be above AMHS in ranking …
Well, it turns out that several schools, termed the “public elites”, were excluded from the rankings. To quote: “NEWSWEEK excluded these high performers from the list of Best High Schools because so many of their students score well above average on the SAT and ACT” :) All of the various state Academies/Governor’s Schools are on this “public elites” list, including the infamous Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology.
I guess I really did get a first-rate education. Not to mention some kick-ass friends for life :)
May 2, 2006 at 9:52 am · Filed under random
I’ve noticed that Discover Card sometimes gets a bad rep with people. I’ve never understood where this comes from. ALL of my dealings with them have been absolutely phenomenal, and their customer service is top-notch. Since we live in a society that emphasizes facts and proof, here are some concrete examples.
I pay all of my credit card bills online, and I do it the last day of the month after I get my monthly MIT paycheck. So come April 30, I go to pay my Visa and Discover Card bills. Surprisingly, I couldn’t log in to Discover Card and was told there were “technical difficulties.” I chalked it up to website issues, and tried again on Monday with the same “technical difficulties” message. Today, I got an email from Blockbuster Online (whom I have set to automatically charge my Discover Card once a month) that my credit card didn’t go through. Discovercard.com still says “technical difficulties”. Weird.
So I call 1-800-DISCOVER and was transferred to the fraud department. It turns out that they froze my account because they wanted to check on a few charges made on my card. It was used at Budget Car Rental and was swiped twice at a Shell gas station this past Sunday. This raised a red flag with their fraud detection system.
Here is what really happened: my students and I took our spring house trip this past Sunday where I used my Discover Card to pay for 2 van rentals at Budget. Additionally, I swiped my card at two different pumps a minute apart to pay for both vans’ gas at the end of the day. Their system registered this “double swiping” as someone having to try twice before the card went through. Ding ding ding, coupled with the van rental charge, POTENTIAL FRAUD! Talk about security. I explained the situation to them on the phone, and when I hung up with the customer service woman, she said “Remember, you NEVER have to pay for fraudulent charges made to your card.” Thanks lady :)
Sure, it was a hassle to have had to call them to assure them that I did indeed make the charges and to please reset my account. However, I would much rather have had this hassle than to have fraudulent charges on my credit card.
This actually reminds me of when there WAS a fraudulent charge on my card. My fourth year at UVA, there once was a suspicious charge of ~$3000 made on my card over the internet. As soon as the purchase was made, Discover automatically froze my card. They then called me to let me know of potential fraud, and after I told them I did not make the purchase, they closed out my old account, opened me a new one, gave me a new card, and even sent me a report summary of their fraud investigation. All of this was done automatically out of THEIR initiative. It wasn’t as if I saw my monthly bill, caught the suspicious charge, and called them. They called ME before I even got my monthly statement.
I have also messed up on paying my bill on time where I was just plain irresponsible and forgot. When I called them to explain, they said “sure, no problem”, no questions asked, gave me the benefit of the doubt, removed all late charges, finance charges, and saved my credit.
Discover Card rules.
