conquering the world one oxymoron at a time
Archive for November, 2006
November 28, 2006 at 10:17 am · Filed under daily grind
Back when I was disillusioned with grad school, I thought about taking the MCATs and applying to med school, because hey, at least I can see the point of med school. And there’s a very defined job at the end of med school. And just maybe, that job is really interesting because you get to talk with people, be an expert at something, and all in all, have a good time.
Sometimes I still think about med school, thinking how much better it would be than where I am now. Last night, the boy asked me to help him prep for a case study for his Pathology class, just look up some information, answer some questions, and go over it with him because he had tons of other stuff to do.
At first, I thought cool! Yeah! Totally! I’d heard bits and pieces of the case studies he preps for before, and they all sound really interesting. For example, a 50 year old male comes in with severe coughing, what’s wrong with him? And then the case leads you through test results, x-rays, observations, and you figure out what the best courses of action are. That type of stuff. So I thought, awesome, I’ll totally look up information for this case for him. In the end, I realized that I didn’t really want to know that much about liver function tests or liver enzymes or hepatitis C. Maybe it’s because it was 2am when I was doing this, but I got bored rather quickly, and it wasn’t long before I dreaded having told him I’d help him.
So in the end, I would have probably hated med school too if I had gone ahead and switched paths. I suppose we always do want what we don’t/can’t have.
November 23, 2006 at 3:56 am · Filed under daily grind
This may go down as the worst Thanksgiving ever if today continues down the course it has these first 3 hours. I have been home for Thanksgiving every single year, never ever missing a year. Last year, I felt like everyone was staying in town. This year, I decided to stay in town, but I feel like everyone is leaving. Going home, going to NYC, going to a friend’s who lives close by. The one person I thought I could count on being around doesn’t want me around because of some stupid wall of pride and arrogance and loneliness.
Remember the anticlimatic Thanksgiving of two years ago? I’m still sincerely and unsarcastically thankful for my parents, who unconditionally love me. Furthermore, I’m thankful that I’m not married to a prick. I’m thankful that Ryan takes time out of his busy Big Law Career Building to write me one-line emails. I’m thankful that I know a man who’s so caring and considerate of my time that he disappears off the face of the planet when he’s stressed out instead of calling me or replying to my emails because that would be oh too bothersome to me. I’m thankful that at least he still cares about me, or at least he tells me he does, and that must obviously be true because he said so.
In the end, I’m still honestly thankful for my friends. Only one-of-a-kind friends would fly “through” Boston on her way home to San Francisco, from Hong Kong, just to see me. Even though the plane flies across the Pacific, and the transfer to Boston is in LA. She’s flying back to San Francisco tomorrow afternoon.
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 :)
November 14, 2006 at 12:00 pm · Filed under pictures
There were rumors of Ben Affleck; there were smoked salmon rolls dropped on the floor; there was Jack completely wasted; there were event managers whom I’d rather not deal with anymore. But in the end, I had a great time throwing what I hoped was a fabulous party, and I hope everyone there enjoyed themselves as well. Some wonderful friends came out to help celebrate, and it was great to have three of us West Side girls reunited in Boston (Xijia, get out of Hong Kong!!).
Here are some beautiful pictures from the night: bday24. Oh yeah, notice from the pictures that I got my hair permed while I was in China. My thoughts on it are ambivalent. I guess I don’t really regret having done it, but it is something that I would probably never do again.
I haven’t been posting because YinYin’s still in town, and we went to NYC this past weekend (those pictures forthcoming). Soon though, soon, you’ll be hearing more from me.
November 9, 2006 at 12:34 pm · Filed under the internet
Sometime before I left for China, I got some weird messages from people on MySpace looking for relationships. Thinking that the “single” status I still proclaimed on Myspace may be inviting some of this, I completely changed my general bio to really ridiculous stuff. I think my relationship status was divorced; I said I was bi, and I also put that I had only a high school education and that I had kids.
Completely ridiculous and obviously made up, right?
Well, when I got back from China, I had several more MySpace messages waiting for me, from girls. Who are bi. Wow, I’m dumbfounded.
November 5, 2006 at 8:36 pm · Filed under life updates
I missed my shower water pressure. Of all things, I missed that the most, and I didn’t even realize it until I took a shower this morning. Oh yeah, and I missed toilet seats. A lot. First thing I though when I found a bathroom in the Boston airport was “thank god I’m back in the US-f*ckin-A, land where I can sit down to pee.”
Some observations during the 24-hours of traveling:
- Boston is COLD. The US-of-A is COLD. It’s sweater weather even in South Carolina, yet I was in short sleeves the entire time I was in China.
- Who the hell asks for 2 rums and coke while sitting in Economy class during a 2-hour flight from Chicago to Boston? The guy who sat next to me, that’s who. I can maybe see buying one, but 2?? He later brought out a Harvard Business School casebook and started reading. HBS, figures.
- Being an air traffic controller could be a really cool job. I listened in on the flight deck live feed during the landing process in Boston, and that stuff was pretty freakin’ sweet.
