i was sitting in lecture today listening to my professor expound upon the intricacies of the heart. btw, i know how an ekg works, so don't mess with me, buddy. in any case, the atrium, ventricle, valves, bla bla bla. how hard the heart works. what role sodium and calcium play.
and then i started to tune out. i've been a lazy piece of poop lately. two months ago, i came back from taiwan, spent a week jetlagged, started working, moved out two weeks later, i'm still unpacking and getting settled in, and i've been doing nothing but working and working and studying when i'm not working. and then crises with friends hit the fan, and stuff has just been really demented. i've been so busy and overworked, i haven't reserved any time for myself.
i'm a tool. a big, fat, crappola, tool.
and it pissed me off. i hate when i am not on top of things, especially when it comes down to my health and getting sick three times in a month is just not acceptable. so i went home, cooked three dishes for lunch (all jam packed with anti-oxidants) and then hauled my ass to the gym tonight. i kicked my tard butt so hard that i could barely walk up the stairs at home.
i've gotta get back on the routine, the schedule, documenting what i eat and how hard i work out. i have a half marathon to run in october.
so i'm basically wiped right now but i'm happy. this is how it *should* be.
i've been pretty busy lately, mostly because my roommates and i are really starting to domesticate our place, and also because school is just ridiculous. plus with allergy season (who the hell gets allergies in the middle of summer), i've been sleeping almost 11 hours a day.
the good news is that our fish have arrived. after scrubbing off nasty calcium water deposits, algae in the tank, and really narsty crap off the bottom of the tank, we have a nice, purdy aquarium with 6 fish. it's actually really exciting. it's been a long time since i've had a pet in my apartment and i love fish.
me happy.
i think this weekend i'm going to go to the monterrey aquarium with cohene.
what is it with me and fish and strange obsessions that wax and wane intensely over the course of a few days?
durr... need more sleep.
top ten reasons why i love living with male roommates:
1. the whole estrogen-regulating cycle thing doesn't happen. you can safely go back to 28 days.
2. you can beat up and sit on them and hit them with pillows and they don't care.
3. they'll take the spiders out of your room.
4. you can eat a lot of crap and not worry cause they're doing it too.
5. they already own all the power tools you could ever need.
6. no pms.
7. arguments/disagreements are forgotten in 10 minutes and problems are actually addressed.
8. you don't need to work overtime shifts as a psychiatrist and therapist.
9. they are so ridiculously patient. they even let you drive their cars.
10. they own nice things that you've always wanted but felt too sensible as a female to own: cars, xbox, big tvs, nice sound systems, the LEAN MEAN FAT REDUCING grilling machine.
i was listening to the radio today when i heard about mcdonald's latest thing -- buy a "giving meal" and a couple of cents from your meal is donated to a local charity.
i love how public companies respond to negative media. a few months ago, when supersize me came out, there was a big backlash against fast food. well, there has been for a while, but the documentary was especially revealing because it captured the prolonged effect of consuming mickey's on an average joe. from what i hear, the documentary was compelling and upsetting and pretty blunt.
now mcdonald's media reaction to the extreme unhealthiness of their food was first to deny vehemently that fast food is bad for us. (that we know is all untrue). now their strategy is to divert our attention to a completely different topic, "well, nevermind how bad it is. you help other people." (this sounds like it was taken out of an LSAT test). well mcdonald's, that's great. i love helping people, but you're still not really addressing the issue, are you?
CNN.com - Spiner to guest�on 'Enterprise' - Jul 19, 2004
i have been redeemed! live long and prosper!!
i am grossly excited.
(note: today will be a random entry.)
the sun, btw, has emerged from the clouds. how happy am i!
i got sick again this weekend. i hate being sick. my stomach, the past two years, has been very unhappy in general. sometimes it won't let me eat for weeks on end. i don't like that feeling.
i love men in scrubs. there's something really sexy about men in scrubs. especially if they have nice triceps.
it's really great how non-superficial i am.
i'm horrible at biology. i never took it at mit so i never learned how to learn bio. i'm actually finding this physiology class to be very hard. but alas, it is a prerequisite.
a guy i met at a party 5 weeks ago just called me three days ago. i'm taking guesses for what his explanation could possibly be. i attribute it to alien abduction. he was snatched, they performed gross anatomy experiments on him and returned him to earth mutated and deformed. i think i like that one the best. now, when his face is all cut up and he probably has one protuding eye, he goes and calls me. great.
i love my roommates. except that one of them has a habit of stealing my stuffed dog, boston, and hiding him from me. today i asked him where boston was and he said, "in a happy place. he came willingly." i want my dog!! i miss boston. what/who else is supposed to sleep with me at night besides boston?
it's a great feeling when you realize that you don't need for the approval of anyone of yourself. it's extremely liberating. today i feel pretty liberated.
Crap!!
I am one lucky ^*(&(*!
I missed the SF tryouts last year cause I didn't know they were going on. I'm so there this year.
Who wants to camp out with me at PacBell?
CNN.com - Age limit raised for 'American Idol' - Jul 16, 2004
so many questions. so little answers. i once dated this guy who told me that he was perfectly comfortable not having the answers to his life. i remember thinking that he was crazy. how can you not have a plan? not have direction? not have grand scheme of how things are *supposed* to be?
although he was a little on the extreme side of directionlessness, i guess he had it figured out. you never really do know, and even if you do think you have it hammered out, life will find a way to surreptitiously creep up behind you and pull the proverbial rug from under you.
i feel like i've spent my entire life trying to figure out where i'm supposed to be. how i fit into the structure and hierarchy of my family, what i mean to my friends, what role i play for my friends, and what role i play as the youngest daughter of an immigrant family filled with overachievers. what it meant to be failing mit. and what it means now, to be out in san francisco, trying to forge my path into self realization.
it sucks. it's pretty damn hard. truthfully, i'm tired of trying to redefine everything that i know.
so, lately i've come to the realization that i don't have to descramble the great enigma now. i'll figure it out, eventually, day by day and i don't need to worry about the grand ramifications of everything until they unfold to me later on. i've been a bit overtired lately, with work, research, school, ta'ing, and the prospect of graduate school applications coming up. i admit -- i'm afraid it'll turn out like law school. that i'll find myself reluctant to go, and yet also not finding acceptance at any location. but i guess i'll cross that bridge when i come.
so the plan for now, is to study for my gre psychology, and apply to health psychology and clinical neuropsychology phd programs. i'll worry about things later as they come. i guess i just realized that i'm not cut out for the corporate world. if companies were run by people like me, the whole economy would soon have collapsed unto itself.
thanks to friends who reassure me that i'm not a directionless twit. a twit, maybe, but at least not a directionless one.
is a genius.
"i'm beginning to see the light"
"beyond the sea"
get it.
this move has made me stay up later and later. i don't like it. i'd much rather be back to a 11 pm, 7 am schedule.
speaking of schedules and such, i went to see the terminal tonight with my friend mikey and skipped out on a few parties that were going on in the city. i'm kind of growing tired of the whole party / networking / people trying to find a date scene, so mike and i shopped in union square for a bit, had dinner, and then went to the metreon. i went rather reluctantly, to be honest, because reviews had slammed the movie. they said it was boring, the set was limited, the plotline cliched, and that tom hanks had done a fairly poor job in his portrayal as bictor nebovsky (sp?).
uhhh. no. the movie is wonderfully cute, without being suffocatingly so, and sentimental, without being tritely so. and hanks, as he always does, carries the movie. catherine zeta jones does fairly well playing a neurotically self-destroying female in love, but she's too beautiful for you to ever really buy her vulnerability and her inability to catch a good love. in any case, i really enjoyed the movie because, time and time again, i'm consistently impressed with hank's ability to portray a plethora of roles, and because he never fails to bring out the humanity and vulnerability in each of his characters in such a way that i am not nauseated and bored, but touched.
and if you're going to complain about the set, grow a brain. it's a movie about a guy who is stuck in an airplane terminal. how large do you expect the set to be? people really need to think before speaking.
and, finally, i enjoyed the movie because it is simply about waiting. how each of us spends our life in a blindly accelerated vacuum, waiting for things to happen, working our way towards goals, aspirations, self-discovery. as i mentioned previously, i've come to a realization about all the things i've been waiting for, or thought that i was waiting, and now am in a position to redefine those goals. so, i guess, i too am waiting. except that i'm waiting for things vastly different from those for which i used to aspire. and i'm not feeling as much of a rush in my wait, however nebulous or confusing the road ahead may be.
more ramblings.
let's see. i was studying today for my abnormal psychology final on tuesday and came across the section on personality disorders and somatoform disorders. it occurred to me that i probably know people who have bodily dysmorphic disorder, obsessive compulsive personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, bipolar I and II disorder, and schizoid personality disorder.
that's odd.
also, on another random note, 5 friends have gotten engaged in the last 6 months and three male friends, who had previously seemed to be steadfastedly single, all found girlfriends in the last month.
what the hell is going on?
to top it off, my ex-NG, the one who made the obnoxious comment to me, has professed feelings of full repentance/remorse/regret (the 3 Rs), says he has reformed, and wants to try to give things a shot when he returns from india later this month.
weird #2.
and, to add more, when mikey was trying on clothing today at club monaco, i caught sight of a dashing chinese boy who went into the dressing room across from him. he and i managed to sneak stares at each other unabashedly for about 5 minutes until i had to go. i suddenly realized that i have a horrible asian fetish. simply put, i like asian guys better than any other ethnicity. probably due, no doubt, to hours and hours of asian soap operas and to my mother's insidious brain washing (okay. not so insidious. it was pretty blatant).
so. here's a random thought (or two) for you:
1. why is it okay for an asian to have an asian fetish and not for a non-asian to have a fetish?
2. my apartment is right next to the N. every 8 minutes or so, a train goes by. but whenever i'm waiting for the N at another location inbound, say, at my old apartment, or at 9th and irving, i feel like i am waiting for hours. actually, i once waited 45 minutes for a train. so why is it that the time in between trains (delta t for all the mit nerds) is greater further down the line than at the beginning? you'd think they all move at the same rate, so if they are all moving at the same rate, how does the lag increase between each one?
3. if you brushed with that new orange toothpaste stuff, and ate an orange afterwards, would it still taste as nasty as it does when you brush with regular toothpaste?
4. why is edamame so *damn* good?
okay. bedtime.
i don't really like moving.
i mean, it's good in a sense because it's cathartic. you rid yourself of the things you never needed anyhow, and you get to reminesce over the things you kept and probably forgot you had. i was pretty impressed with myself; it took three people about three hours to move all my belongings. that means that i'm not too much of a packrat, and that i don't tend to accumulate unnecessary things. but what i dislike is the chaos of moving. there is no rhyme or reason to how things are packed away (unless you are really anal and a move of 7 blocks necessitates you to organize things you're going to take out in a week), and i don't like that life is thrown in a state of upheaval for a couple of weeks.
for example, i haven't cooked in over a month. i feel like my system is going crazy. it needs some home cooked food.
in any case, now that i've semi-settled in, and my birthday festivities are over (thank you everyone who came to help me ring in the quarter-cent), i've had some time to think again. my good friends are probably afraid of hearing that i'm thinking again, but it's inevitably a part of who i am.
i just think a lot.
i came to the realization the last week or so that i'm not sure i want to go on to phd and spend my life chained to the goal of reaching tenure. this is odd coming from someone who once worked at a law firm where the motto is "the more you work, the better" and for someone who once considered medical school -- neurology, no less.
maybe this change has come with my birthday, or just the realization that, while work is wonderful, fulfilling, meaningful, and can really benefit many others, work is not *who* i am. it's only *what* i do. i can be good at it, i can publish in journals everywhere, but that doesn't really have anything to do with *who* i am as a person.
it has been observed in many cultures, especially asian ones, that children and adolescents associate their self worth with how well they test on their sats and what college they attend. it's important to do well on these things, for sure, but i don't know if i think that one's identity is necessarily dependent anymore on what they can achieve, or what level of achievement they have attained.
so the point of this story is that i don't think that i'm as wed to my professional outcomes as i used to be. if i get into a phd program in clinical neuropsychology or health psychology, sure, i'll happily go. if not, there are far greater things that i could do with my free time (when i'm not stuck on psycinfo or writing 50 page papers), or my free money (charities, volunteerism, traveling, etc).
this is definitely a huge change for me, having always been really driven and really focused on what i was supposed to be. maybe i'm not supposed to be anything or anyone in particular, and i think i'm really okay with that. this realization took a huge burden off my shoulders. there isn't this impetus to have everyone all figured out, or to make sure the pieces fit into all their right places. there probably isn't one solution or one place for everything, anyhow, and it was pretty stupid of me to have tried to dictate and make everything fit.
ugh. this is a really poorly written entry. oh well. you get the point.
so anyhow, i think that this is a pretty good realization. i'm gonna go fo' a run.
really kicks booty.
split level condo, skylights on the top floor, two big closets (thanks to my roommie giving me the hallway one), lots of light, 2 second walk to the muni and bus, 4 minute walk to asian grocery stores galore, big airy windows.
i miss one of the old roomies, but the new place, despite unpacked boxes, too much crap, is already starting to feel like a real home. last night, the three of us were up late cleaning the kitchen, discussing what goes where, unpacking dishes, talking about the THREE boxes of alcohol we have in our living room. and it felt nice. i like living with these guys.
somewhere i got lucky. i got lucky with family, incredible friends, and i got lucky in finding two great guys who want to live with me and in finding this place. i am oddly blessed, i tell you. and i don't even know what i did to deserve it. but i'll take it, even if i look like gollum (which i do).
on another note, one of my students told me she thought i was turning 20. therefore, i meep at you!
blah. quarter of a century.
in a few years i'll look like gollum. then who'll want me? maybe only meta. because i let her meep at me.
today, i was in a horrendous mood, and feeling disgustingly angry for that matter, until i saw goonley and meta today. and then my day lifted.
horrible because this past month (since my return from taiwan) has been one endless hell of a month. research, work, study, class, students yelling at me, the inability to multiply in my head, having gone running only once, friends leaving, friends coming, friends having breakdowns, a roommate being snide, my advisor basically telling me that i sucked, bla bla bla.
so i made the decision to move out of my apartment, only to find that the roommate with whom i do not get along well is moving out and the one i like is staying. augh!!! this all happens the day AFTER i sign the lease. i can't believe my luck. thus is murphy's law.
and on top of it, i'm turning 25. WHAT THE HELL?
but then i saw g and m, and i got to do some outrageous giggling with m, and i got to shoot a few snide comments to g. and we went to see spiderman ii, which had me gripping the edge of my seat, snorting in laughter, crying (shut up, shut up), upset, frightened and totally enthralled. i would have enjoyed more of it if i was wearing my glasses and not sitting in the second row, and if meta and i weren't being so picky about noticing the inconsistencies in the movie but the move kicks ass, plain and simple. go see it. it bests the first, and leaves you wanting more.
sigh... me happy.