Saturday, January 24, 2004

 
Post-Midterm Day is awesome. Although I feel like I partied/slacked off way hard today, it was good relaxing. Basically after the midterm, came back here, ate, then played Smash/007 until it was time to eat, went for PHO!! And then Rachel and David and I walked down to Steve's boat. It was cool. We ate his awesome dips, chatted, watched some Christian song music videos and then had this awesome conversation about traveling, diversity, and just the types of people you become friends with. It was good stuff. Highly enjoyable. Pictures will be forthcoming. I know ya'll are dying to see what Steve's boatshack's like, well I took plenty of good pictures. The CSA party is coming up! More partying! Hopefully I'll get to go to QFC and Safeway sometime tomorrow, and also get in some of that stuff called homework. :P

I'm in an interesting mood. It's probably because I watched that really messed up movie "Slackers". I feel like I should be pounding out a poem, doing another lap around the fountain, or just type until I fall asleep. The most likely one to actually take place would be the first one, but I don't know what I'd write about. And it's 4 in the morning. And I still need to take a shower before I can go zzzzzz. Even a 10 to 15 minute speed poem, would be really crappy. Okay okay, fine, I'll come up with a poem before the clock on my microwave hits 4.

Morning

Beep, beep, beep...
Groggy, u n f o c u s e d.
Today is pouncing
it's here, it wants to eat me.
I can't open my eyes,
They won't stay open and I'm not even in lecture yet.
I struggle to stay conscious, make a good choice.
My first choice of the day
Skip?
Sleep :)
Cold :p
notes. ARG.
um...nap later...
cold . . . :(
And I step out
Into the cold.

--Feiya Wang

Unknown @ 4:01:00 AM

 
Finally, my Bio midterm is over and I am currently chillin' in Kyle's room. Everyone's playing Smash and I am taking a 'break' from it (i.e. I suck too much at it and playing it makes me depressed). Yeah, maybe we'll play Halo????

Unknown @ 4:09:00 PM

 
HAPPY CHINESE NEW YEAR!



Okay, so I'm a total NYRD and went to the Chinese Student Association meeting today and sweetness! I'm going to be an usher for the CSA Lunar New Year Celebration which is happening this Sat. in Kane 130 at 7 PM but the doors open at 6:30. Check out their awesome site --->CSA Events
Also, there's an after party dance at Aristocrats for $15 flyer for $5 off.

If you would like to help me usher just come with me to Kane 130 at around 5 or 5:30, we can help them stuff red envelopes, girls are supposed to wear a traditional top & black/gray slacks or skirts OR a chi pao, guys wear a button down shirt & black/gray slacks. This is definitely going to be kickin'. And afterwards, how about hitting up some bubble tea? :)

Unknown @ 12:58:00 AM

 
Chinese New Year's Eve!

Here's a link to "Free" Red Money Envelopes S&H $1.95

It's probably a little too late to get those going, but hey, red construction paper works great too :).
Apparently, according to the article above, we're supposed to eat dumplings...the thing is, when are things like eating dumplings in order to gain wealth considered pagan rituals, and when are they done just because it's tradition and lots of good memories come from doing it and no one really believes the whole money thing? There are a LOT of things like that are rampant among Asians. How many Asian restaurants have you been to where you've seen either a big fat frog with a coin in its mouth, or a cat with its paw up? And the whole, Year of the Monkey, is just like a less frequent horoscope. But it's more ingrained, being a pig or a dog or a rat is part of who you are. While you might not know what year your parents were born in, you know what animal they are. My dad's a Dragon, my mom's a Sheep, my grandma's a Rabbit, my brother's also a Sheep. What does this mean? Are many traditions harmless and that's why they're okay? Like for instance, paying homage to Santa Claus on Christmas Eve by putting out milk and cookies. Isn't that like an offering to a 'god'? Is it okay then to just continue to do certain things that are traditionally done during the holidays but just not believe in them? Obviously I'm not talking about having a little Buddha shrine and offering incense and burning money, but drinking some liquor because it's what you've always done, and not necessarily with the intention of hoping you'll live longer. I'm sure there's a bunch of really obvious traditions I'm forgetting, but you get the idea. How pagan is pagan? Should certain traditions be phased out?

Unknown @ 2:24:00 PM

 
Last night was really weird. Diane and I woke up at around 6:45 because there was this awful rattling noise. At first I thought it was my printer being jammed, but then I was like, is it someone outside the hall? Then it was like, it's in the bathroom...mysterious. And ontop of weird sounds, I had this really vivid dream.

I dreamed I was a missionary overseas and I had two partners, both Asian males about 28-30 years old. We were walking along a path that had bunk beds and just people sleeping all around. The leader guy jumps up on a rock and starts climbing over and in the process wakes up a woman who starts babbling, I couldn't hear what she was saying at first and I assumed that it was in Mandarin, then the guy next to me starts talking to a woman and I couldn't understand for a while and I thought then that he was speaking in Japanese (not that I've heard much Japanese so I'm not sure), but then he switched over to Mandarin when he realized that she spoke it too. He explained to her that we were missionaries for Falun Gong, which was kind of a lie, but there was a guy in uniform not more than five yards away, he looked slightly a taken back but didn't say anything. We were assigned beds and also names. The leader was named Matthew. His name I read from the two Chinese characters that were either on his shirt or sheets, I can't remember anymore, one was in the upper left corner and the other was in the bottom right corner. The other guy's name I read from a paper tag tied around his neck with string. It was also two Chinese characters, for Little Pretty, which when you say it in Chinese, sounds a little like little sister. I said the first character outloud but paused on the second one because the top and bottom of the character were kind of separated which kind of threw me off, and then the leader guy was like, yeah, little pretty, and I was like yeah! That's totally what I thought it was but I wasn't sure. Anyway, then I complained that I didn't get a name tag like the two of them and we discussed my name for a long time because I kept on saying one of the characters wrong and trying to find words that sounded like it. Unfortunately, I can't remember what my name was now. So we're all walking now after getting situated and I'm making fun of Little Pretty, saying that his name is kind of girly. Then we come into this room and there's this guy sitting facing us at a table and there's enough room for all three of us to sit across from him. So we sit down and start looking at the menu. It's red. I flip through it and I'm like ugh, I don't like choosing...and then I think, oh, we're around Japanese people apparently so I flip to near the end of the food section and there's this picture of a woman monk in a gray wrap thing and next to her is this entire meal and there's an english description of it, something like a gray speckled burrito that had plain white rice in it with butter. And in the picture on top, there's these two people who are lying on top of the table, I had the impression that for some reason they felt that it was more comfortable than sitting in chairs. The woman who was lying down was holding chopsticks. Then I kept on flipping the menu and the latter part of the menu was like market food, raw veggies and stuff like that. Stuff that you'd buy and take home to cook. And there was another picture of a woman surrounded by veggies and it looked almost like a meal.

So that's pretty much where my dream ended because I got woken up by the sounds, and I tried to fall back asleep but I kept on worrying about what to order, because I really felt like I had seen the menu somewhere before. I finally ended up deciding on something with meat and snow peas, and then Diane woke up too and we went and investigated the sounds and met Jenny in the bathroom, she was going to go take a shower but was originally too freaked to because she just watched a scary movie the night before and her imagination was going haywire.
I got to see the sun rise this morning though.

Unknown @ 10:27:00 AM

 
I have an incredible amount of stuff to read, thus, I am blogging out of guilt to my readers. I promise I'll get the numerous pictures that I took yesterday up sometime...Probably after my Friday Biology Midterm. Volunteering was pretty cool, Diane, Shiaokai and his buddy Craig and I went to the Redmond Starlight Children's Foundation which serves the entire state of WA with only THREE full time staff. It's like Make a Wish Foundation, but to a smaller scale I suppose. They partnered up with Starbucks and so they had hundreds of boxes of toys that people donated to their local Starbucks.

So our jobs were to unpack the boxes, put the toys in bins according to what kind of toy they were (dolls, cars, electronics, books, etc.) and then take the toys out of the bins and pack them as compactly as possible into other boxes and label them. So we did this for two hours, then had lunch at a Teriyaki chicken place, then worked hard for another 3 hours. Then I freaking speed walked all the way from the Montlake Bridge to the U Village Barnes & Noble Bookstore, I made it in 15 minutes. I was 45 minutes late to my meeting with Pastor Shin, but I got to talk to him until 5:30, it was cool. And pretty much from then until now, I've mostly been focusing on getting caught up in my readings for all my classes.

Unknown @ 3:41:00 PM

 
Whoa. Halo kicks some major @$$!! I was playing in Kyle's room with Kyle and Ryan for a while and then Anna came by which was good because I was getting my butt whooped by both of them, and then I played against Anna and that was good since we're both beginners and were challenged by each other instead of just trying to survive. For some reason, it seems a lot easier than RainbowSix, which I sucked at, and Doom, which I also sucked at. I think I'm about as good on it so far as I am on 007. Which isn't saying much I suppose. I watched Matchstick Men tonight, it was a okay movie *twitch* huh?

Blog updates have been infrequent at best, from everyone, myself included. Too busy partying with each other. Not enough time sitting down and thinking. Assuming of course, that thinking is usually a good thing. I haven't been thinking enough, but tonight, when I did spend some time thinking, it seemed like I was still going around in circles. Maybe my conclusion is just going to have to be that it's not going to be resolved. That it'll just have to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, which I hate because I usually don't like not having some kind of rough plan etched out, nor is it efficient at all, having to re-evaluate at every step, every time.

Vagueness strikes again. I could ask for guesses on what I'm talking about, but if I do that and no one comments, then that'd be a waste of time huh?

Unknown @ 2:29:00 AM