“You need to let go of the past”

The past few nights I have kept myself awake thinking about him, reminiscing on old memories. One by one, I replay them in my head until I miss him so much that I am inspired to call him, hoping that he might tell me he misses me too.

“Sup?” he says.

“Oh I gotta go, the basketball game is on.”

He leaves me alone with the dial tone, with not even  a piece of self-respect to cling to.

Perhaps I keep thinking about him because I am afraid of forgetting. For one last time, I am going to allow myself to enjoy our memories as I record them here in writing over the next few days. After this, I will never think about him again – until a future when all this is behind me, and I can revisit this entry without mixed feelings.

“The first time I saw you, my impression of you was just that you were very Chinese,” you told me, referring to the oversized red fleece handed down to me from my mother that I always wore to track practice. We were laughing about how we had both noticed each other as freshmen, but despite being on the same track team and in the same Chinese school class, had only met as seniors.

I sat with my friend R_ in the Chinese school cafeteria. He was working on homework with a little punk kid because his Chinese sucked. Then you sat down across from me. Turns out that punk was your brother.

I could see the resemblance. You had a punk smile on your face, one that read “I’m the man, yo”. You wore clothes that were too big for you, but not in a ghetto way, just in a – I don’t know how to buy clothes of the right size – way. I thought you might get up and break dance, miserably. I wasn’t far off the mark. You tried to impress me by folding a paper crane, which I threw away as I left. Undaunted, you challenged R_ to a sprinting race and then to a basketball game to show off. But I wasn’t interested and left for my orchestra rehearsal.

You always did love to talk about yourself, even as soon as we first met you were showing off the fan your grandfather penned with calligraphy. I listened, nodding my head and asking you questions, if only out of pity that you actually thought people were as interested in yourself as you were.

“That’s when I first started liking you,” you told me, “because you listened to what I had to say”.

In truth, I was just being polite.

Always a good thing to consider when you are frantically writing a 12 page essay that is due the next day..

1. Spend a few months living as a migrant worker in China
2. Join a competitive ballroom dance team.
3. Learn how to dance like Chris Brown.
4. Live on an ashram in India
5. Live with an ethnic minority tribe and learn their folk traditions
6. Write a book.
7. Live on a panda conservation center in Sichuan, China and research
8. Learn to cook
9. Join a competitive sports team
10. Find out what I want to do for a real job.

That night I sneaked out of my boyfriend’s house. I seem to have a flair for dramatic break ups.

Dear __,

I’m sorry I didn’t leave tonight because I was trying to hurt you. I left because I felt  uncomfortable staying in your house. I’m tired, emotionally not in the right place, and so I’m going to wait for a few days to make sure I don’t make any rash decisions. Let’s just give each other some space for a while.

Crystal

I can’t sleep so I just wanted to get some things off my mind that I forgot to say tonight (or thought about later).

I’ve always wanted to hack into the google headquarters and see what are the most common search terms. From looking at the statistics of my website, I can get somewhat of an idea. Hey, I do it too. In the privacy of my own room when no one is looking, I’ve searched for some pretty embarrassing terms. Like when I first started dating and googled, “how to be a good kisser”, or when I gave in to the media hype about the singer from hong kong and typed in, “Edison Chen sex scandal pictures”. If google were to publish a study about this, it would be an amazing snapshot of actual social attitudes that are publically repressed.

I’ve been following American Idol this season because I’ve recently been struck by Indian fever and have fallen in love with Anoop. Unforunately, he’s been voted off – but Adam Lambert has recently caught my attention. An extremely talented, confident, 27 year old from San Diego and favored to win the competition. But people are asking: can a gay idol win? I thought this quote from a NYT article (#7 on the most read rankings) was quite telling.

Unlike other reality shows, said Joe Jervis — a gay activist blogger whose recent mention of Adam Lambert on his site Joe My God generated 50,000 hits from people searching the term “Is Adam Lambert Gay?”

Yes. Before you even ask, I’ve typed that in as well. Pretty much verbatim too. Yeah – we all talk about how sexual orientation doesn’t matter, just like how we shouldn’t talk about people behind their backs, but in the end, people eat up scandal and gossip like vultures descending on prey. I can’t explain it nor can I say I like it; the only thing I can do is admit that I am guilty of it as well.  It would be an interesting experiment to see how many visitors find my site via that search term.

When I neglect my blog, that means one of three things:

1) I’m so happy that I either don’t have time to blog because I’m busy enjoying life, or I don’t need to blog to release my emotions

2) I’m so busy and stressed out academically that I don’t have time to write

3) I’m too depressed start writing

It’s been almost a week since my last entry, and as I reflect back on this past week I must say that it’s definitely not option number one. Blogging is just like any habit, once you miss out once, it’s easy to continue missing out, and every day missed brings down my self esteem. Every day, it was just so easy to spend that last hour of my day stressing instead of destressing. Over the weekend, I slept almost twelve hours every day (on Saturday I woke up at 4 in the afternoon) and canceled just about every commitment I had (dance practice, chorus performance, elderly center volunteering, squash game). It seems that I’ve entered a state of stress-induced paralyzation and lethargy.

Some of you may have seen my facebook and twitter status last night: FML FML FML FML FML. Today at four I had a twelve page essay due, for which I had only started writing last night. Halfway into the night, with twelve pages of bullshit and hours of reading left to go, I could not manage to focus my attention on my work and kept watching Taylor Swift videos on youtube. I was also craving chocolate cookies but could not gratify myself. It’s funny how despite the fact that I have less assignments this week, my stress level was higher. Even though I’ve dealt with writing papers of equal length every week, for some reason I couldn’t handle it last night. Looking back, I have absolutely no idea how I went from twelve blank pages to twelve pages of text, and I also have no idea where my 16 hours went. But in the end, no matter how far away from completing your work you think you are, work always gets completed.

As I crawled into bed tonight, with no intention of writing, my mind started to race – as it usually does when I try to sleep – and I could not fall asleep despite having only slept two hours last night. That’s when I decided that I should finally get out my laptop and write down what it is that is bothering me.

I have a friend who has feelings for me, but I don’t have feelings for him. It’s strange because theoretically he is just my kind of guy: smart in a specialized field (biomechanical engineer going to grad school next year), yet cares about receiving a liberal education (takes random classes like psychology), has similar interests (was in my Chinese history and literature classes), and knows how to have fun (is my dance partner in the dance competition). My friend (the green elf) even told me that he sounds perfect for me. But the laws of attraction cannot be explained, and I just am not attracted to him.

This is not a situation that is foreign to me. It’s actually pretty common for my guy friends to like me. My roommate says she can see why: because I’m pretty open and warm to others. Generally though, my friends are pretty far away and I can just let the situation smolder. Additionally, we were very good friends to begin with, so after the fact we can return to being good friends.

However, in this case I only met him at the beginning of the term and am living in the same building with him for the next five weeks. If I deliberately ignore him, a) it will be quite obvious and require significant effort on my part, and b) we won’t just go back to being friends – but will probably not continue to develop our young friendship.

I had the sense that he liked me since the beginning of the term. One night I had a nightmare in which I dated a tall Asian guy who looked remarkably similar to him; in the nightmare, I let myself agree to see the man, even though I didn’t like him and ended up feeling horribly trapped in a relationship I never wanted.

In my wakeful life, I’ve been pretending to play dumb to all his signals. However, I have a feeling that I can’t keep putting it off anymore. He is a pretty forward guy, and it wouldn’t surprise me to hear him confess his feelings for me soon. Today, I heard it through the grapevine that he has been confiding in our classmates about his frustrations over how I don’t respond to his signals. Our dance competition is this Saturday, and he proposed a celebratory dinner afterwards – somehow I feel like he is planning more than a celebration of our dancing.

Sigh:: so what is bothering me is – how do I let him know that I am not interested in him, without hurting his feelings and still keeping the possibility of developing our friendship? What should I do if he does confess his feelings for me?

This is what my academic life consists of:

• Smallpox class: taught by a Stanford prof for the other Stanford students studying at Oxford.
• Immunology tutorial: One hour a week of one on one learning; weekly 8-9 (really 11-12) page essays
• Econometrics tutorial: Also one on one, two hours a week, problem sets

For anyone who read a recent blog post, you’ll know my feelings towards smallpox. Stuck in a class that I don’t want to be in, I recently discovered that I’m not even allowed to take the class pass/fail. Now, I just locked myself into doing loads of not-too-useful busywork and going on bi-weekly uninteresting field trips.  When I am able to make it to class, I usually fall asleep because I have been spending the entire night writing my essay. Yesterday, I didn’t even wake up from my 10 minute “nap” that I had planned to take between finishing my essay and going to class.

Despite my misgivings, at least I know that if I do the work, I will get the grade. What frustrates me more is my tutorials. Initially, I thought that this was a great system. One on one teaching tailored to my interests and debating the points brought up in my essay. What ends up happening is I spend endless hours summarizing information to produce a “textbook-chapter-like” essay, requiring no analytical skills except for trying to synthesize a bunch of information into 8 pages (which I always go over and write 12). Then I get a bad grade on it because I’ve not included certain details (or not included the teacher’s favorite molecule). I cannot stand the unpredictability and the mono-voice.

Then there is my econometrics tutorial. The instructor thinks I’m a complete idiot because I can never answer his questions. But it’s not that I don’t know the answers, it’s that I don’t know what his question is. For example, today he asked me “what is this best way of looking at [a certain equation]?” and I wanted to say “with my eyes”. When I say I don’t know, he’ll state something completely obvious and then remark that I haven’t been doing the reading.

You know what I miss about my Stanford education? I miss when not knowing an answer and not being made to feel like an idiot. I miss having more than one voice in the classroom so that the instructor does not dominate. I miss actually trying to write a good essay rather than a passing one. I miss sleep.

Speaking of sleep… since I haven’t slept in two nights…

I really wish my life were a song. Since it’s not, I try to get as close to that as possible. Today I spent six consecutive hours singing; combined with the probably four hours total a day that I randomly sing to myself, that’s a good most of my day right there. My high school friends used to call me an iPod shuffle. Once I tried an experiment where I was not allowed to sing. Suffice it to say that my mood dropped significantly – I was gloomy and irritable.

A friend and I tried busking on the street today. Neither of us had ever done it before, so we figured why not? It was a lot of fun, and we hope to be able to keep doing it every week! Since I’m lying in bed and can’t sleep anyway, I’ll upload a video of us performing Alanis Morissette:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcSK5__oyPQ[/youtube]

Ironic

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USpQw87SNtA[/youtube]

Hands Clean

I just finished making this present for my mother and grandmother.

Sorry for those who can’t understand Chinese. The beginning is a poem about mothers, the song is called “Invisible Wings” by Angela Chang, and the end says “Mom, Grandma, you are my invisible wings” “Happy Mother’s Day!”

Let me know what you think

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxsxJcAiCYg[/youtube]