One of my biggest weaknesses is not knowing when to let something go.

How do you recognize that you’re treading down a dead-end path?

How do you stop lamenting how much time you’ve wasted and realize how much more time you will waste if you continue?

How do you decide to fold when you’ve already put so many chips in the pile?

How do you find the humility to admit to yourself that you made the wrong initial decision and find the courage to turn around?

How do you stop and tell yourself, I’m not happy. And change?

These are all questions I struggle with in every aspect of my life, but especially relationships and academics. I’ll leave relationships to another day, because, as I left class after falling asleep during the entire lecture for the second consecutive time, the question burning in my head was: Should I drop my “Smallpox” class?

I came to Oxford with three goals: meet people, join clubs, do well in class. Well, I think I’ve pretty much succeeded in joining too many clubs and taking on too many classes. Ever since I came to Oxford, I have been sleeping about two hours a night or pulling all-nighters consecutively. Not only has this shown in the quality of my work, but now all of that sleep deprivation has taken a toll on my immune system. I cannot continue this lifestyle, and know that I have to drop something. The first thing that comes to mind is my “Smallpox” class.

When I first met the prof, he made his class so so exciting. He brought in his stuffed animal viruses and told us about all the neat field trips we would go on. What clinched the deal was how his complete support for his students showed in the way he talked about his former students. As an aspiring infectious disease specialist, his expertise was right up my alley, and I hoped to be able to develop a relationship with him. What better setting to do that than in a foreign country where we have to spend eight weeks together?

It took me two weeks to realize that I was not getting that much out of the class. Lots of busy work, weekly time consuming field trips, classes at 9am, (on a related note) constantly falling asleep during lecture, and uninteresting content. The biggest concern holding me back is the lamentation that it took me song long to realize this. I have already done so much of that busy work for the class, attended so many lectures and field trips, and (if I decide to drop,) will have nothing to show for it.

But what do I get out of the class? Another “A” on my transcript? Other students are taking it to fulfill major or general requirements, but I don’t need it for that either. A faculty resource? I’m sure I can find other opportunities. The time I would free up could probably be better used on my other classes or sleeping, and to improve my work with the faculty who actually matter (i.e. who will be writing my med school rec).

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not lazy, and it’s not that I prioritize my extra-curriculars above academics. But if I really loved the class then I think I would find a way to make it all fit.

Wow. That was really helpful. I approached this blank wordpress space torn between two options, and after carefully thinking and recording my thought process, it seems clear what my option should be.

5/3/3 Feel relieved to have finally come to a decision, hopefully can sleep now (insomnia again, that’s why I woke up to write this post), but very very tired after little sleep and a swim test today.

Update: After that cathartic moment, I realized that the deadline to drop classes was May 4th, four days ago. I guess I’m stuck.

If you haven’t checked it out yet, a piece I wrote was featured in American Goulash, a blog about growing up in a cross-cultural environment.

Also please reply to my poll in the feedback page to let me know what you would like to see more of!

Full moon overlooks Jericho neighborhood

solitary midnight biker

Hotel worker in kilt uniform gets off work and greets his friend on bike

last bus of the night takes midnight commuters home

Street lamps light up a panel of ghost houses

homeless man uses store light to read

Kabob vans serve hungry late night customers until 3 am

a girl, a mailbox, and a sign post

I signed up to participate in a Mood Study conducted by a Stanford undergrad. Each week I get emailed an online survey to fill out. What would your answers look like? Here are mine:

1. How many hours did you spend on homework this week? 11-15
2. How many hours did you spend on extracurricular activities this week (including meetings and outside preparation)? 16-20
3. Did you have a midterm or a major paper due this week?   Yes
4. In the past week, how often have you laughed a lot? a few times
5. In the past week, how often have you cried a lot? a few times
6. How satisfied are you with your life as a whole? Dissatisfied
7. Compared to other people your age, how intelligent are you? slightly above average
8. How often was the following true in the past seven days? You were bothered by things that usually don’t bother you. sometimes
9. You could not shake off the blues, even with help from your family and your friends. Sometimes
10. You felt that you were just as good as other people. sometimes
11. You had trouble keeping your mind on what you were doing. a lot of the time
12. You were depressed. a lot of the time
13. You were too tired to do things.  most of the time or all of the time
14. You enjoyed life. Sometimes
15. You were sad. a lot of the time
16. You felt that people disliked you. a lot of the time
17. You never take things that don’t belong to you. Disagree
18. Do you agree or disagree that you have often said something bad about a friend behind his or her back? Agree
19. Do you agree or disagree that you never swear? Disagree
20. Do you agree or disagree that you go out of your way to avoid having to deal with problems in your life? Agree
21. Do you agree or disagree that when making a decision, you go with your “gut feeling” and don’t think about the consequences of each alternative? Agree
22. Do you agree or disagree that you have many good qualities? neither agree nor disagree
23. Do you agree or disagree that you have a lot to be proud of? neither agree nor disagree
24. Do you agree or disagree that you like yourself just the way you are? strongly disagree
25. Do you agree or disagree that you feel you are doing things just about right? strongly disagree
26. Do you agree or disagree that you like to take risks? neither agree nor disagree
27. Do you agree or disagree that you live your life without much thought for the future? neither agree nor disagree
28. Do you agree or disagree that it is important for you to fit into the group you’re with?   strongly agree
29. Do you agree or disagree that in social situations, you tend not to follow the crowd, but instead behave in a way that suits your mood at the time? Agree
30. Do you agree or disagree that your behavior often depends on how you think other people want you to behave? strongly agree

4/1/3 4 hours of sleep total over two days

I once heard one of those groaner jokes that went like this:

What did the priest say to the student who lost his 10 page paper after a power outage?

Jesus Saves!

We’ve all heard this before, but I am here to urge you to listen to this advice before you lose everything you have.

If you’re like me, you love your media collection. You might spend hours making playlists, organizing your photo library, and uploading funny pictures to facebook. Over the years, the music and photos I’ve accumulated have taken up the vast majority of my computer’s memory space, making it inconveniently slow. But when I started to store video files, my computer, (named Darling), just crashed.  I recently decided that enough was enough.  I decided to get tech-saavy and bought a 500GB portable external harddrive (named Kiki – after Kiki’s Delivery Service), and moved all of my multi-media. I also used Kiki to back up everything on Darling.

The only thing is I never backed up all the media that I had moved onto the harddrive (dumb mistake number one). The technical ogre that I am, and too stressed out by the 12 page paper that I had only just started and needed to finish that night, I forgot to safely eject the harddrive before taking my laptop away (number two). The next time I started iphoto, all of my pictures were completely gone! Years worth of thousands of pictures, of which some older ones were uploaded online but the newest ones had not yet been stored anywhere else.

I know that I probably shouldn’t tether my life experiences to those pictures, but I still feel like my entire past has been lifted from underneath my feet, that all twenty years have suddenly been robbed from my memory.

Please learn from my misfortune:

• always take the extra ten seconds to eject your disks safely
• back up your harddrive, and your external harddrives
• periodically upload all pictures online just in case (plus it gives you an excuse to procrastinate on facebook)
• don’t be too dependent on technology (I usually tend to distrust it). develop pictures that you really care about.

I stayed up all night last night writing a 12 page paper, and now I have another paper that I’m supposed to write due at 9:15 tomorrow. I haven’t started, but feel too upset and preoccupied to start. What’s one night and one essay compared to an entire life, gone?

2/2/3

Update: OMG I just randomly tried something and I found my photos! I love myself!  I can’t believe I figured it out all by myself! I feel like a little three year old who just learned some easy task, and now thinks she is the smartest person in the world (In fact lots of three year olds are probably better at using technology than I am). All you computer people out there are probably rolling your eyes and thinking that it was such a easy problem. (Heh <== most technologically inept person in the world right here). I am going to run around my house telling everyone about how proud they should be of me! Now I have the energy boost to finish that paper!

7/2/3 Biggest mood swing ever

Update: Finished the paper at 3am. Finally, some SLEEP!

In case this has happens to you, I will post below a detailed description of how to solve it. Don’t read ahead unless really interested —-

The problem: What happened was that iphoto was still running while I removed the hard drive, so the next time iphoto opened and pointed to the library file, it just opened a blank library. Even though my library file was unharmed and still contained all my pictures, the iphoto program was accessing it inaccurately. The problem was compounded by the fact that I use time machine, so I had multiple copies of the iphoto library stored on the external hard drive and in the end couldn’t decipher which was the correct one. Also, I moved various iphotos to and from the trash so often that everything was mixed up.

The solution: I used a program called Grand Perspective to scan my computer and show graphically what files were taking up how much space. I saw large squares representing several different iphoto libraries, but one of them was much larger than the rest. (In case you don’t know, iphoto library is a file that brings all your photos together, it is not a folder with separate jpeg files for each photo). When I opened them, however, all of them came up blank. How can a blank iphoto library have two different sizes? I was convinced that the large one was the culprit. It was storing all my photos but redirecting to a more recent library upon opening. What did the trick was to copy the library to my comuter, eject the hard drive (so that whatever library iphoto was referencing was not accessible), open up iphoto, and manually select the desired library. It worked!

Wow. I feel like Sherlock Holmes.

This post is inspired by this NYT article

The US and other countries are seeking to spend millions of dollars on swine flu, a threat which has a death toll of 1 in the US and ~100 worldwide. The panic surrounding swine flu has caused numerous organizations to label it an ‘emergency’. Yet where is the political mobilization and alarm surrounding other killers? This year, 13,000 dead from ordinary flu, and 14 from guns in school. 25 dead in Mexico versus 6,000 dead from illegal drug trafficking in Mexico. Where is the state of emergency for these ‘chronic’ threats? One may argue that we don’t have the resources to respond to all these threats, but our response to swine flu clearly shows that we do but just don’t care enough. It’s a shame that we have grown so immune (pun intended) to these killers. The article brings up Dick Cheny’s 2002 proposal to vaccinate the entire country against smallpox, arguing that Iraq may have bioweapons and use smallpox against the US. Luckily, he was not successful, especially because of the thousands of deaths that would have resulted and the lack of evidence of bioweapons in Iraq. The swine flu threat really reminds me of the War on Terror and other discussions on threat construction.

Another side of the article was prejudice.The pork industry  is frustrated at their losses due to ignorance of how swine flu cannot be spread via pork, and now they want to call it ‘Mexican Flu’. It is infuriating to me how some people only care about prejudice when it is directed at them. In order to not perpetuate the myth that pork carries swine flu, let’s peg it on another carrier – Mexicans! Despite the fact that if you have not been to Mexico, you are not likely to be in contact with the virus, swine flu has fueled bigotry against an already marginalized minority group. Employers refuse to hire Mexican workers, and customers are avoiding Mexican restaurants. I can already see how it might turn into a biological argument about how the Mexican gene pool makes them susceptible to disease, harkening back to the days of eugenics. I think its funny how we talk of employment equality and lack of prejudice, but as soon as a pandemic hits, we go back on our word. I guess it takes a pandemic to expose the bigotry of our society that we usually cover up.

Swine flu has made its way into Oxford

I had heard stories and seen pictures of the energy, excitement, and fun of May Day traditions. In Oxford, the choir sings on the top of Magdalen tower at six am, followed by Morris Dancing on the streets below. Traditionally, students jump off of Magdalen bridge, but the bridge has been closed off.  Staking out a place on the Magdalen lawn, a lawn on which 364 days of the year it is forbidden to step on, I waited eagerly for six. I heard that it was impossible to get anywhere near the tower, and was feeling special that we got lawn seats. People came dressed in a wide variety of costume, from tuxedos to colorful suits to traditional English garb, and I even saw someone dressed as a sandwich. How could this be anything other than great?

I started my adventure at 10pm the night before. I went to King’s Arms, the local pub on Holywell St where I learned the wonderful British tradition of ‘pennying’. If you slip a penny into someone’s drink while their hand is on the cup, they have to chug the entire remainder of the drink. I had a Cloudy Apple Cider, which really just tasted like beer and not much like cider, and since I am one of those types who slowly sip at their drink, of course I had a full glass when my friend so discreetly reached her arm across the table and pennyed me. I started drinking, and halfway through I guess people expected me to stop but I kept going. After I finished, everyone was so surprised and commended me on my chugging ability, saying that I put all the girls there to shame. I didn’t even realize that I was exceptional – I just did what I always do when Chinese government officials take me to dinner; force myself to drink even through I don’t like the drink at all.

At midnight I went to Babyface, a pub/dance club. For those of you who have ever been clubbing in the states or China, you’ll be disappointed if you go come to Britain. The DJs are horrible, the songs undanceable (and unbearable even outside of club settings), the transitions are awkward, and the British are not the best dancers. If you come to Britain, find your nightlife elsewhere.

At five thirty in the morning I started the May Day festivities. This was it, I had stayed up all night in anticipation of this.

When the church bells rang six, the choir began to sing. For five minutes. Then everyone went home.

How anticlimactic.

Confused about what Magdalen Tower or Morris Dancing is? Watch this video of my May Day!

4/4/3 My phone fell in the toilet + I had three nightmares last night. First, my little brother died; second, my other little brother died; third, I got back together with my ex-boyfriend. It’s funny how it seems like those are parallel levels of frightfulness.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TA0NYJEUTfQ[/youtube]

I once said that my life was so messed up, I wish I had a little green elf sitting on my shoulder telling me what to do. Well I have one friend who is the closest thing I’ve got to that little green elf. The night before I left for England, I was chatting on the phone with him and asked him what he thought my goals for Oxford should be. He said:

1. Hook up with at least three people
2. Make at least ten friendly acquaintances and get to know one person very well
3. Do as many activities as possible

Seeing as how I am studying at Oxford, but not a registered Oxford student, don’t get to take any classes with Oxford students, and live in a house with Stanford students, it’s going to be very hard to reach out socially. But I’m determined that at the end of this term, even if I haven’t made any friends, you won’t be able to say that I didn’t try.

Happy May Day! Check back tomorrow for picture of Morris Dancing!