every now and then, someone coins a great term.
beckfat came up with **bulation (insert my last name) to describe my behavior. my nickname was hencefort **bu. it's stuck. everyone in boston calls me that.
and now, meta has created DABs = Dorky Asian Boys. this basically describes the type of men to whom i am attracted. more specifically, this entails being taiwanese, incredibly intellectual and brainy, philosophically pensive and thoughtful, insightful, but slightly emotionally and socially reserved (though grounded) at first, well rounded (athletic, worldly, musically inclined, brave enough to try all the crazy things i do), preppy (like right outta a jcrew or banana catalogue), smelling of good laundry detergent, or as i said: desirable_qualities( !(nerdy) AND !(dweeby-geeky)AND !(emotionally tard) AND !(fobby)), and quite sensible in all the ways he would need to be.
meta laughs at me. all the other asian women i know are *avoiding* asian men. and here i am, looking for my "sui guh." does he exist? probably. it'll just take me 10 million years until i'm done with my thesis and applications to find him. but if meta keeps enticing me with promises of them abound at uc irvine, maybe i'll just head down there and gather myself a harem.
after a short hiatus from running and a change in running shoes:
New Balance 765 - Women's Running Shoes (W765BY)
i took off on the trails this morning at 7 am. because i was so exhilarated by the weeklong absence of adrenaline, i was running much too fast and completely failed to watch where i was going. oof! i tripped on a hidden stone, fell, skid a few inches along the dirt and rocks, and skinned my knees. great.
rule #1 with trail running: watch the terrain in front of you.
duh!
well, at least my knees and heels don't hurt anymore, except for the retarded cuts i have on them.
i'm a dork.
=(
i'm returning home to the east coast today for a few days. i'm really excited. the past few weeks have been crammed full with too much work and play, fortunately, and friends and crises so going home will be a nice break from that. the meditation retreat will have us sitting for up to 7 hours a day, in 1 hour increments, and heaven only knows how i'll be able to manage that.
but i'll return rested and refreshed, and once again ready to take on all that i have to do.
on a side note, write me if you want to read my grad school essay. it promises to be moving.
(maybe)
just should not be.
*i should not like the smell of gasoline, but i do.
*i should not like the smell of freshly printed papers from my laserjet printer, but alas, i do as well.
*i should not work so much that when i lay down to sleep, i cannot fall asleep from my overactive brain.
*i should not dream about psychology, but i do.
*my heel should not hurt. i do not like plantar faciitus. it's ouchy.
*i should not feel guilty for being unable to reciprocate someone's sentiments, but i do. asian guilt is horrible.
*i should not eat the way i do, but i do. running makes one constantly hungry.
*i should not be under 5 feet tall. but dang it, i am.
*99.7 fm should not be such a damn good radio station, but it is. i had an urge to lindy with myself today when they played me some bobby.
*i should not be so blessed. but fortunately, i am.
i hit 6.5 miles on saturday, and have been doing about 22 miles a week in preparation for the half maration in october. as expected, my body has begun to react to all the pounding.
a change of shoes recently resulted in planta fascititus and it band issues. i'm gonna fight it, damn it. no way in hell am i going to stop running.
my head hurts.
i like simplicity. i do not like clutter, baggage, or excess belongings, be it physical or emotional. goonley even commented that my room was fairly simple -- i do not purposefully strive to add complexity to that which needs to be simple.
evidence: the fact that i have eliminated many from my social circle who matter not, the fact that i have gone through 4 phases of spring cleaning in the two months that i have moved, the fact that i have overhauled my life to consist simply of work and training for the marathon and a few good friends.
i attempted simplication.
i failed.
someone needs to tell me, WHY WHY WHY i always seem to find myself in situations that are so ridiculously, dementedly, retardedly ass backwards emotionally draining and consuming? i don't seek it, i advise friends on how to *avoid* it and yet it finds me. maybe i have an emotional tardation pheromone i give off.
of all the emotions, love ought to be the easiest one. you love him, he loves you. it's the simplest, purest, and "highest" ideal many of us strive for.
so, then, can someone tell me why i haven't slept in two weeks and why i feel like a vice has taken hold of my heart? at some point, i realized that it was a somatic effect (or affect, if you please) when the pepcid ac stopped working.
i, my friends, must truly be forlorn. sigh.
lately, i have felt this overwhelming urge to write things with exclamation marks!
to the trash, i bequest you!
away with you, vermin of the sky!
enough of these piddling concerns!
my stomach is ouchy, i tell you! ouchy!
why? i'm not sure. but it just makes me feel better.
this was a pretty busy week with school. 13 hours on campus on thursday. somehow, i am busier here than i was when i was at the firm. poorer in the bank, richer in the soul though. that is a tradeoff i would gladly remake a million times over.
yesterday, shirley and i wine at the cheesecake factory in union square and watched the sunset and the people traipsing back and forth. in a still moment, i smiled at the little dots below and laughed at myself. i am utterly too fortunate.
right now, twin peaks is being magically swathed in sheeths of pink and purple clouds that seem to be crawling to nowhere. i had a good day. i scrubbed the kitchen and bathtub, i studied, i talked to two of my best friends, nearly got convinced to go to la, and will be making dinner with a good friend that will consist of chicken tarragon, shrimp risotto, salad, and ice cream cookie sandwiches.
sick, i say, sick.
tomorrow is on to the 8 mile run. thus tonight means i am entitled to carbo bomb. i am content.
a shout out to g-dawg today -- goodluck!
after a brief respite, i'm back into the thick of academics. it's all piling up this week, and although i'm not sure *how* i'll get it done, i somehow find the seemingly insurmountable challenge of it all very thrilling and intoxicating. i still obviously haven't conquered that masochistic edge reminiscent of the ole' college days, but i'm enjoy this ride and all the added weight of what must be done.
the class at berkeley i'm taking is really intense. fMRI technologies involve serious quantum mechanics and signal processing, so i had daddy dig out my 6.003 book and send it to me. nyquist frequency and fourier transforms? i can still *see* the sinc wave in my head but what it does, i no longer remember. in any case, the lecture yesterday was a bit over my head with all the spin theory and 90 degree saturation with protons and saturation vectors, bla bla bla. i'll have to ask christophe about this stuff. it confuses me.
what it did show me was that clinical neuropsychology is the perfect field for me. it's a mixture of all the physics and science that intrigue me but that i can't specialize in, and the biology that underlies our functioning, as well as the psychology that manifests itself in our behavior. i'm so curious and intellectually fascinated by this stuff.
other than that, still chugging away at life and work and learning how to figure out what love means to me. the four hour conversation with pseudo-bf last night didn't help. he challenges me to think completely differently about love, but i'm not sure how it works to change anything. i don't know if i've ever met someone who pushes me more to question my definitions of loving someone, but i'll think about this later. i'm too busy.
i think i live a ridiculously wonderful life.
this week pretty much consisted of my learning things i really love, professors really complimenting me on my work, good possibilities related to my academics that are waiting to unfold, and some serious quality time with good friends.
i want to record down what i did.
thursday: erik and i had dim sum and i help meta move. speaking of which, i should call her. then goonley, erik and i had dinner at vino e cucina and i passed out on a class of pinot grigio.
friday: erik, marsha and i went to sonoma. i didn't drink but i found sonoma to be very interesting. it's not as touristy as napa, but i liked the look and feel of the wineries better. that being said, i still don't like red wine.
the three of us came back into town, and shirley and steve both called separately, so we decided to meet at tango gelato on fillmore. steve brought jp, and we all vegged out for an hour or two over gelato, and went our own ways and drove up to twin peaks. checked out the city for a bit, commented on how beautiful it was, and then went home and passed out.
saturday: got up at 8 am, went running, came home and made cookies and had omelettes with erik and marsha. then the three of us and my two roomies and krazdaz drove down to santa cruz. met up with sebby and bea, and goonley, honeyfields, ln m, and alex, and spent a day vegging out on the beach, playing volleyball, and sleeping.
the weather was gorgeous. a bit too hot for my tan-avoiding sensibilities, but great. and when can you get that many of your close friends together?
after santa cruz, we drove to cupertino village and had taiwanese food at south taste restaurant.
it had been too long since i had taiwanese food. needless to say, i'm really happy.
in any case, marsha got me tix to the dave matthew's concert today, so i best get ready for that. and then tonight means i better crack down on work. i've been playing too much.
the good:
found out i may be co-authoring a chapter on emotional development with a professor at berkeley.
got good response to my thesis inquiries.
research is in good shape.
ran 6.5 miles
helped meta move, hung out with ken for a while.
erik is here from boston.
the bad:
i think my friend gave me scabies. red rashes appearing all over chest. badness. getting worse as we speak.
note: this has no reflection on my cleanliness, as most people know i'm a clean freak.
CNN.com - 'Hero' wins box office again - Sep 6, 2004
goonley and i went to see this yesterday, amidst our extreme exhaustion and my ominous morning. it was different to see it on big screen; although i've already seen the movie 7 times, i cried through many parts. the theatre experience allows you to hear many things you didn't when you were watching it at home, and the details of the cinematography are much more impressive when you're faced with colors and effects on a grander scale. for some reason, everything the actors said also seemed to carry more weight. the poignancy of their words were also more forceful.
or maybe, i just love tony leung.
unfortunately, they slaughtered the subtitles. i'm not really quite sure why they did so because it actually detracted from the movie in many places and smothered you more in communist propaganda, but that's besides the point.
it's hard for me to explain why i disliked the subtitles so much. the movie has always carried the same meaning for me, as i understand what the actors are saying w/o having to read the subtitles. so it's kind of confusing for me to interpret the movie in both mandarin and english subtitles, and to think of the various interpretations each version of the movie carries. because, really, the subtitles *do* change the movie, but i think in a sort of an english/chinese/taiwanese melange where meaning is sometimes communicated by a proxy expression for a word that doesn't exist in the other language.
so when i watched hero yesterday, my mind was in a bend between the various interpretations, both of ones i've had before, one i developed from watching it a 8th time, and ones i have had due to various discrepancies in the language and translations.
interesting. i will have to think more about this later. exactly how does a comprehension of the various modes through which a movie is linguistically presented alter one's interpretation of, and identification with, a movie?
i'm pooped. just got home, cleaned up, talked to ninja gaiden playing roommate.
i had a fun time at meta's goodbye party. and i guess i want her to know that i'm sad she's leaving. it's rare to find that you like your buddies' significant others, but she's one that i very much like. there's a good chance maybe i'll end up where she's at next year for phd, but who knows.
blah. cool female friends are hard enough to find. and then they go and up and leave on you.
i've never claimed to be a particularly good friend. but, in the case that someone does come to me seeking advice and consolation, i hope that i provide them with worthy insight, compassion, and helpful ideas about their dilemmas. i'm more than willing to do this for my close friends, and in some cases, i feel like maybe some of them have benefitted from the knowledge and insight i've gathered from my studies.
but lately all my "psychoanalytic" theories and foundation is really starting to run over into my personal life. people come to me *only* when they need help. that is, they don't talk to me unless they have a crisis and are in desperate need of consolation and sympathy. and i'm starting to grow tired of listening to the same stories, over and over, especially when i feel like these people don't really care to keep in touch with me unless they need help.
i talked to my mom about this and she mentioned, "well, someday, you will be doing therapy to complete strangers. so why is it you will expect nothing out of them, and expect something out of your friends and acquaintances for the compassion and advice you give?"
hrm.
good question. 10 points to mater.
i don't know. maybe i'm more attached to my friends, and feel that i invest more heart and soul in their problems than some stranger. maybe i feel like they don't appreciate all the personal time i give up to share their sadness and confusion. maybe it's because when they call my tortured, i feel tortured and i feel upset. maybe it's also because i feel like when i give advice to certain people, like a suicidal hotline caller, that they actually want the advice and listen to me. instead of just using it to placate themselves and then never paying heed to it. maybe it's also because i get paid when i'm doing professional therapy, and because i can leave it at the end of day, instead of staying up till 3 am talking to people when i should be sleeping.
i don't know.
but it makes me feel guilty and it makes me feel really bad that i'm resenting my ability to advise people and also that i'm feeling the need to *deprive* these acquaintances with help that they need. or maybe i haven't really learned the definition of selfless giving yet, because i'm unreasonably expecting them to give in return to all i give.
i'm sounding angry. this is bad foreshadowing for my future. i am feeling the serious need to separate my academic life from my personal life. socializing shouldn't be therapy practice for me.
i really enjoy wandering through book stores and everytime i do, i seem to chance across a book that i really want. i'm usually stupid about it though, and don't write down the titles and find myself horribly regretting that i didn't at some later point in time.
so i'm going to write down all the names of the books i want, and their respective urls:
essentials of neuropsychology and clinical neurosciences: a primer on fmri, ct scans, and other commonly used technologies today. provides a physics introduction, and the basic methodology behind each technique.
the mind and the brain: all about neuroplasticity, brain circuitry. just cool stuff.
DSM - IV: it's what doctors use to diagnose mental illnesses. you have several dimensions along which you can diagnose someone's problems and this is the book that tells all.
war and peace: what would i be without my classic literature selections?
there are more. but i just needed to keep track of these few. loose pieces of paper don't seem to work well for me at all.