conquering the world one oxymoron at a time
Archive for August, 2006
August 31, 2006 at 9:38 pm · Filed under the internet
When I first started a blog, I wanted everybody to read it. I put a link in my profile on AIM, hoping my friends would click on it and discover my blog. I would randomly drop the fact that I have a blog in conversation hoping that those I was talking to would go check out my blog. Now I wish I hadn’t done all that. I also wish I had not ported my entire blog over to my own domain. I mean, come on, google “shan wu”, and the first search result that pops up is this blog. No semblance of any anonymity at all.
As the readership of this blog grows, I no longer have a good idea who reads this. I know some friends who do, but they’re not the ones who worry me. Nor am I even that worried about my parents finding this; there’s nothing in here I wouldn’t tell them anyways.
I am afraid of the acquaintances who may be border-line stalkers (not that there is anything wrong with being a stalker, because I am probably one of the worst stalkers out there). I am afraid of my students, my residents, my colleagues, random people I meet, people I am dating, friends of the past. I am afraid of the people whom I want to write about.
As a result, I no longer write anything controversial. This blog has become pretty bland, a peanut gallery where I comment on everyday mundane things that happen to pique my interest for no apparent reason. Whereas the things that I want to write about the most, the juicy stories, the people around me, the strange happenings, my personal thoughts … those are all the things I can’t write about.
The bottom line is that this blog has no anonymity. So I am thinking of starting a new one … one that I can actually treat as a diary. One where my identity is completely obscured.
August 29, 2006 at 3:13 am · Filed under going out
Talk about missed connections; I’ve had two in the past month. That’s not a particularly good track record. Not to mention that I think I may have isolated some friends with my recent erratic and overly un-reined-in behavior. No wonder, with the amount I’ve been going out and drinking lately, my feelings would be hurt by me too. Granted, my friends have been just as crazy as I have been with the partying, but when we are sober, we all sorta pretend that things aren’t weird. Pretty bad, I know. We talk to each other as if nothing happened when we were tipsy/buzzed/drunk, and as if there are no tensions to speak of.
The really bad part is that the gang’s not really stopping … it’s only Monday, but enough people have sent around emails already that we have a party/club lined up every night beginning Tuesday night. I didn’t even party this hard in college. Maybe we are consciously seeking for the alcohol-induced loss of inhibitions so that we can be a bit more honest with each other.
Unrelated, but worth noting: I had two different people ask me today if a friend of mine is gay. He’s not, but how do you tell if a guy is gay anyways? I was at a gay friend’s birthday party Sunday night. It was attended by mostly men, who were all so unfairly attractive that I was even convinced that god did indeed spend a little more time on them. Given the crowd, I was extremely confused as to who was fair game, and who wasn’t. Frustrating at best.
When it comes down to it, these situations are lose-lose to me anyways, no matter how I look at it. The gay guys make a losing situation; they are definitely not fair game. The not gay ones … well, I usually find out they’re not gay by seeing them being totally into another girl, by which point, the situation is also totally completely lost. *sigh*
August 24, 2006 at 8:04 pm · Filed under grad life/MIT
I am so incredibly overwhelmed. I think it is going to be another late night at the lab, and I have been working all day. Things at the GSC blew up today with multiple sets of people very upset about multiple things, and I have do damage control and temper people, while trying to hold it all in myself and continue to be cordial and appear professional and open-minded when really I just want to blow up and scream back at people. I feel like everyone wants a piece of my time right now, and I don’t have enough time for even myself, so how can I possibly have time to give to others?
Liang is right. Last August was the same deal; he was there with me as I griped about orientation, research, my advisor, MIT, Kaplan, people, relationships, friendships, everything under the sun. Ironically, that “water water everywhere” post was from August 24 …. and today is August 24. Wow, for all the wondering I did about everything’s that’s happened this past year, I am today at the same state I was one year ago.
It’s funny how life works.
August 23, 2006 at 1:06 am · Filed under friends
Usually wine makes me very sleepy. Tonight, wine just made me very very talkative, and now I am wide awake with thoughts racing marathons in my head.
Ryan and I went to Radius tonight, for “Restaurant Week.” When the hostess called to confirm my reservation yesterday, she off-handedly said that they’re only doing lunch for Restaurant Week, and do I still want to keep my dinner reservation. I kept it, thinking “what the hell, why not splurge?” and also knowing that Ryan probably wouldn’t mind. Once we got there tonight, we sorta understood why they don’t do dinner Restaurant Week dinner menus; the average price for entrees was ~$40. We had a fantastic time anyways, not to mention some excellently prepared and presented food. Ryan even picked a nice bottle of wine because apparently he garnered some wine knowledge this summer despite not having taste buds, but I guess a whole summer of eating out on Ropes & Gray’s tab can work wonders.
Surprisingly, we talked a lot about Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, which I’ve been meaning to read for about 6 months now (it’s just sat on my bookshelf). It made me think of when I bought it for Jason’s birthday right after New Year’s, and the hours and hours and hours we went on talking about anything and EVERYTHING sitting in Atlanta Bread Co that day. I was worried about Jason driving 2 hours home so late at night; I think he was just happy to spend time with an old friend and not have to face his family for a few more hours.
Sometimes I worry about Jason. Other times, I’m glad I don’t have to see him but once or twice a year. I thought that I would be worried about Ryan, too, but I was glad to see him as happy, as talkative, and as opinionated as ever today. It’s so rare to find those people with whom the conversation never gets awkward, and I never ever find myself searching for the next small-talk topic.
Maybe that’s why Ryan & Jason are both such good friends to me. They are like the brothers I never had. I know them so well, but more importantly, they know me so well. (Ryan knew to ask how I wanted to share food before just plopping something down on my plate, and to emphatically say yes without even consulting me when the server asked if we wanted a couple of clean extra plates). I am completely comfortable around them, and I really don’t care what stupid things I say to them, and I tell them the kinds of life details I only reserve for my best girlfriends. Basically, I’m not afraid to talk to them about anything, including conventionally awkward topics, while being completely at ease because I know that they will both still love me for whom I am, along with all the ridiculous things I think and say.
Soulmates are so hard to come by that I really do try to hold on to them whenever I discover one.
August 22, 2006 at 2:43 am · Filed under grad life/MIT
Taking inspiration from Samuel L. Jackson, I thought perhaps a few expletives would help to save me from my journey to overcommitment and eventual, inevitable failure. Can I make a list of things I need to do? Can I cry out about how absolutely swamped I am? Just once?? I know I HATE it when other people do this, and I can’t believe I’m going to be one of THOSE people, but please just indulge me for a second here; I think it may actually make me feel better.
My to do list (a subset):
- organize f-ing career fair banquet
- magically convince grad students that they should care enough to serve on the institute committee on radioactivity
- update uva club of boston calendar (which btw is 2 months out of date, with no one to blame but me)
- go put on a happy face and meet & greet freshmen who arrived a week early
- go put on a happy face and meet & greet the parents of freshmen who either love me or hate me or love to hate me
- go put on a happy face and meet & greet returning upperclassmen who arrived early planning to talk to the freshmen when they eventually get here only to find that the freshmen are already here
- damage control damage control damage control
- write a speech to deliver to ogle-eyed new DMSE grad students to welcome them to the institute because obviously, i’m the expert on why one should love this place. obviously.
- take on the world of the GSC because all the other officers skipped town
- redo campus tour path, not to mention twisting arms & legs of friends to get them to be tour guides
- write an article for the GSN about my identity crisis of being american, chinese, 23, near-sighted, not deaf, not mute, not ovulating, and not accepting booty calls
- somehow actually spend some time in lab so I can perform a miracle, bring my stupid finicky dead cells back to life, prepare a thesis proposal, convince my committee that I am a worthwhile student to have around, and then actually try to graduate before I turn 93
It is also 1 am, and I am still in lab, waiting for my 500,000 mls of FBS to thaw. Maybe my problem #1 is that I should stop blogging and actually do some work. My problem #2 is that I should cut off all contact with the outside world while I write and prepare my thesis proposal. My problem #3 is not having enough time for myself, which I would argue precedes all the other problems.
On top of all of this, I wish I would stop getting emails asking if I want to “come over and watch a movie” … more on this later maybe after I sleep on it.
*EDIT/ADDITION*: it is now 2:30am; i am getting ready to leave lab, but not without incident:
1) I broke the pipet in our lab hood. I can’t fix it because i can’t find the needed part, so people will be greeted with a “sorry, it’s broken” note tomorrow morning. go me.
2) I think I just sent an email to a list that contains all grad students at MIT. I unintentionally used my own personal email account instead of the GSC’s. I may have done this multiple times. I’m not entirely sure, which makes the situation even stickier.
3) I am a mess, and I need to stop blogging, go home, and go to bed.
August 19, 2006 at 7:46 pm · Filed under random
My first weekend in Boston in what seems like forever, and it is already jam packed. I have maybe an hour right now to sit home in my pajamas, relax, watch tv, lay in bed, read a chapter in a book I’ve been trying to finish all summer. An hour, and that’s it. Then I’m out an about. I really want to just say “screw it” to everything, call it a night, and watch a movie. By myself.
Students/undergrads are already moving in this weekend. Next weekend grad orientation starts. I thought I had one more weekend, but no, next weekend is when everything comes crashing down. It will also mark the last weekend in August, which is pretty damn scary considering that I have made zero progress on my thesis proposal since a month ago.
This whole summer just flew by. I’ve done a lot, and in the end, it’s been a ton of fun, but none of it has been very relaxing. I really just want one weekend to myself, with no phones, no emails, no party/birthday celebration obligations. I want a weekend when I don’t have to really talk to people, when i can sit around, do nothing, dance on the carpet in my socks to stupid music, and just have ME time.
I’ve not been working much all this summer, so really I’ve had a vacation all summer. But all the “vacation” has been so exhausting that I feel like I need a vacation from vacation. I am feeling claustrophobic and suffocated, and I feel like I need a vacation where I can just be by myself for a while.
August 18, 2006 at 2:14 pm · Filed under grad life/MIT, dating/relationships
guy: You’ve been text messaging all night.
me: yeah, I know. It’s fun.
guy: I feel like I should pull out my phone and text you
me: haha
guy: but I don’t have your number
me: …
I guess campus pubs are no different than Boston bars. And here I thought I was being extremely unattractive and making a fool of myself in the Thursday tradition, belting out karaoke at the top of my lungs despite not being able to sing to save my life.
August 17, 2006 at 6:32 pm · Filed under music
Liang, who is traveling through China this summer spreading aero/astro joy to Chinese students, introduced me to the forefront of asian pop through his latest, most illustrious blog entry. People, this is the cool of the cool. For someone as untrendy as I am, this is a huge step for me to actually know what’s popular! I’ve never felt so “in” :)
The song is 童话 by 光良, which I joked was essentially double “Liang” (see my comments on his entry). His entry also has instructions for how to download the song from baidu to listen for yourself. Apparently, this is what’s hitting China like a typhoon this summer (not literally, because Typhoon Saomai is no laughing matter).
The chorus of 童话 goes as follows:
我愿变成童话里
你爱的那个天使
张开双手
变成翅膀守护你
你要相信
相信我们会像童话故事里
幸福和快乐是结局
Which roughly translates to: “I want to become the angel you love in the fairytales, open my arms and have them turn into the wings that will protect you. You need to believe, need to believe that we will have a happy fairytale ending.”
The full poetic eloquence in the simplicity of the lyrics and melody is lost in translation, but you get the gist of the chick-flick/romantic-comedy cheese :) That’s why we girls (and Liang) love it so much! And as Liang writes, “it’s sung from the point of view of a guy whose girlfriend is dying of cancer.” Awwwww, so bittersweet.
Gotta love the good-for-nothing-except-cheesy-karaoke asian pop :)
August 16, 2006 at 2:02 pm · Filed under dating/relationships
Gosh people, simmah down, keep your pants up, take a hint, and bugger off. I’m not trying to be a flake; I don’t want to be mean, but sometimes you just don’t get it. You people stress me out. Just leave me the f- alone.
August 15, 2006 at 5:02 pm · Filed under wahoowa
Every so often, I see wedding and engagement pictures of friends, or get sent his-and-her accounts of proposals, and when the couple are both virginia grads, I’m jealous. I think about how these couples will return for reunions both ecstatic to be back at their alma maters, both reminescing the good ol’ days at Virginia, both nostalgic about first dates on the downtown mall, 21st birthdays on the corner, romantic strolls around the lawn, dancing the virginia reel at the balls …
The proposal stories of scavenger hunts in the pavilion gardens, of popping the question in front of the Rotunda, of rings hidden in front of particular lawn rooms … all of these make me wish that I had me a Virginia gentleman, too.
Am I unusual in how attached I am to Virginia? So much so that I want a UVA boy too? I had the best four years of my life at Virginia, and I want someone who would understand why. But more than anything, I want someone who can share the joy with me of going to Charlottesville year-after-year-after-year, someone who would know the special meaning of 26 East, someone who would dress our kids in orange and blue, and someone who would know to get down on one knee in a seersucker suit on the terrace of the Rotunda on a beautiful spring day with the scent of blossoms all around us.
*sigh* oh well. too late now :)
Remembering the purple shadows of the lawn, the majesty of the colonnades, and the dream of your youth, you may say in reverence and thankfulness:
“I have worn the honors of Honor, I graduated from Virginia”
- The Honor Men by James Hay, Jr.
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