the REAL reflection

Eric pointed out that my last entry was not much of reflection at all, which I totally agree. I think that the long entry before that caused a brain fart so I couldn't really think much or the determination to write more. So now I'm somewhat determined to write a long entry today! Let's hope the fatigue from last night won't get the best of me.

The past few days have been contradicting each other of being uneventful and quite eventful. It's only been uneventful during the day since there's nothing much to do except drive at some places to go grocery shopping or to drop off my brothers. Other than that, I stare at the computer and talk to a couple of people and read the Taiwan brochure that my dad gave me. However, I find that at night is filled with things to do or look up. Well, I guess it's also most of the time I'm talking to people online and skyping in wee hours. I'm actually quite amazed of how long I could stay up lately considering that I would freak out if I stood up later than 12AM during school.

However, I think that it's still worth it in the end because I was able to share alot of the feelings that I couldn't open up before. At first though I was very hesitant in telling people how I feel or the concerns that I had. In a way, I do feel like I'm burdening people with my worries, knowing that they have no power to change anything. Alot of times I feel disappointed to whom I tell because that individual becomes clueless of what to do and mindlessly listen to things that he/she can't relate to. Because of this, Eric mentioned that my level of attachment can grow rather deep, which I found to be painfully true. In the end, I figured that it was best not being close to people because of the level of attachment and expectation that I can potentially have with others. I've done it before and it hurts losing that feeling of security and trust, and I'd to try and be shot down again. That doesn't mean that I won't trust anyone anymore, I guess the degree of trust just won't be as easy to achieve from me because of my past experiences.

So the past few days have been pretty hectic since my sister's graduation was this week. Two days ago, my family minus my father drove to my parents' office to meet up my dad. Seeing that my dad went out for dinner, we ended up waiting for my dad until he returned. Personally, I found that a complete waste of an hour because we were essentially just sitting there doing almost nothing when we could have saved that time to drive to Irvine first and start the packing. After my dad got his dinner, my siblings and I grew hungry since our family has been lazy and neglected to cook for the last few days. So, we ended up driving to Taco Bell and stocked up on tacos and burritos and went ahead to Irvine.

Looking at Irvine reminded me back at Berkeley and how large the difference in size, security, and cleanliness they both have. Besides the armed robbery that my sister had a couple of months ago at her hall, I always viewed Irvine as another city of Walnut, except it's bigger and prettier to the point that I would actually agree to Jason if he called that city the surburbia maxima. After living in Berkeley for a couple of days, it made me realize how safe most of us are in Walnut or in any suburban city in southern California. I guess that living in Berkeley will give me a good insight of how real and unsafe the real world can be at some degree...

Anyways, so we went to visit my sister and help her pack all her things in her dorm room. If you guys don't know, my sister is a resident advisor (RA) in the Mesa Courts of UCI. Basically, she's in charge of a hall of about eighty residents to make sure that they aren't doing anything against housing policy (drinking, smoking, drugs, etc.) and to check if all of them have checked out accordingly. Of course there are always the fun part of the job since she gets to bond with alot of her residents during the year with movies, outings, or activities. In all, RAs are supposed to be role models for the residents as well as a "mother" while they are transitioning to college.

One great benefit of being an RA is that you get your own room, your big own room, and your big own room that has your own bathroom and entrance. That means, alot of stuff. I don't blame her though, I'm sure that I would have much more stuff than she has at Berkeley. Anyways, my family and I spent a couple of hours wrapping and boxing up her things. It was very tiring, but it was touching to see her and her residents crying together and saying their goodbyes.

Today was my sister's graduation. I must say, UCI prepares their graduation very efficiently. You see, at high school, the staff forces the seniors to rehearse for two days while UCI takes only an hour to get everyone lined up and their names down. That's what you call efficient. The number of graduates was about the same as that as my graduation, but the time length was much shorter. Most of us were so tired that we fell asleep after we cheered on my sister when her name was called. It was good that the graduation took place indoors too, we would have fried if we were outside.

After graduation, our family took a bunch of photos together as well with her other friends. It was amazing to see her graduate already and she her grow and mature through each year. I really want to express how proud I am to be her sister and a great role model, but I feel I've already made it redundant enough while she was at home. I think the great thing about her being in college was that we were able to be much closer and share alot of interests together. I'll stop from there.

Since most of us were hungry, my sister drove to Yogurtland. My mom gave us a clear message that she wasn't a huge of yogurt seeing that she hardly liked any of the flavors that it offered (and if you've been to Yogurtland, they offer over ten flavors of just yogurt). She also left the yogurt as soup in the end since she ate too slow. Oh well.

Okay, I'll end it here since there's much more to update soon that I haven't mentioned yet...

deep thinking and reflection

Summer seems so uneventful now a days since I came back from CalSO. After spending a couple of hours on the post yesterday, I still resort to this blog again to talk to myself (in a way). I've been wanting to change this blog looks, but blogger leaves a limited amount of choices to do. This is probably one reason I don't particularly like using blogspot because of its limitations. I've been so used to utilizing HTML and Livejournal that using blogspot has led me to be unsatisfied with the design features of blogspot. I'm considering leaving this soon if I get really annoyed by the limited features.

As my brothers and I were browsing around Blockbuster for movies, I wanted to rent so many movies that have been recently released such as "The Bucket List," "Jumper," "P.S. I Love You," and many others. I managed to rent "The Bucket List" and "27 Dresses," so I'm hoping that my brothers will come home soon from their get together so that we can watch the former.

Walnut has been pretty lonely since most of my friends already left to Taiwan or somewhere out of town. I'm excited that the 18th is coming soon! I'm also looking forward to seeing my sister graduate since she worked so hard at UCI to earn it! It seems that time flies by so fast. I can still remember the excitement of me and my sister graduating on the same day four years ago. She has grown so much, I'm so proud of her!

Inspiration with Tired Eyes

I am back from the dead. Kind of? Considering that I had about four hours of sleep the night (actually, morning) before makes me feel as though I am still dying from lack of sleep. Oh well, it was worth it.

I really need to make blogging a habit rather than an obligation for me. I DO enjoy blogging, but there are just so many other things to do or I'd rather do (yes, Stephanie, you are so dedicated to your blog). I think I mentioned this in my previous entry, but I feel that there's so much to say but at the same time I have so little to say. Call me a seeker of attention or what not, but I feel as though the opinions that I make is rather insignificant and waste of time for me type and others to read. The more I think of that idea, the more I feel reluctant to try continuing. I suppose I degrade myself too much. Well, happy one year for this blog, let's see how long it'll stay up and updated for.

After a few weeks after not updating, nothing much has been different. At least, I don't feel any different. Noticing that many people make a larger deal about graduation than I do makes me feel as though I'm neglecting everything happening and just let it go without me considering how important it is. Though, I found it peculiar that I didn't cry at the graduation at all, which helped me win a bet against Eric (haha). I laugh now that he has a lovely Dir en Grey desktop wallpaper on his laptop for a month. It was quite amusing hearing him shutter in disgust (?) while I was up at NorCal in his apartment.

Back to graduation, I was very grateful that my dad, brothers, and sister came to watch me get a diploma. I was a bit sad that my grandma and mom couldn't come, though I tried convincing myself that high school graduation was not as important. Also, since my mom had alot of things to do in Taiwan, I didn't want her to risk missing alot of her work and encouraged her to stay there and miss my graduation.

I guess another reason why I didn't feel as sad for graduation as I should be is because of the many things that were coming up after graduation such as CalSO, my sister's graduation, and Taiwan! Maybe I was so excited about those things that I was too preoccupied to be sad. However, I will miss my close group of friends alot because I would be one of the few who will be living up NorCal along with Sandra and Levey. However, I doubt I wouldn't see them often either because of the limited selection of classes that I can pick. I'm sure though that we will all still be able to keep in touch with each other since communication is fast and convenient. Just being able to see them everyday is a habit that might be difficult to overcome.

After graduation, I stayed overnight at Sandra along with the rest of our group. After KTV-ing and fooling around for hours, I realized the great effect of the meds that I had to take during the week. Lack of sleep with medications equals no good at all. Overall, it was a fun experience to sleep over and bond with everyone before everyone had to leave out of town.

Which reminds me! A week ago or so, I developed a mouth infection after I bit my tongue really hard. However, I never really realized how critical it was until my lymph nodes became swollen and my gums grew sensitive and red. Later, I grew hot with a fever while we were at Santa Monica beach. The next day, I went to see a doctor and he told me that I had a virus that looks related to Herpes Simplex (no, not the STD). He then prescribed me antibiotics. During that week, I felt very depressed that I couldn't eat or talk properly for a very long time. Losing weight and being mute half the time made me feel sluggish and unhappy since I was used to eating periodically and talking to others. Most of the time, I resorted to mumbling or making weird noises so that others would understand bits and pieces of what I want to say.

While I was up at NorCal with Eric, I forced myself to talk because it would have felt awkward not talking to him or impolite. That night, I felt a burning feeling of my tongue that didn't get better the next day, but I guess it was worth it considering I had alot of fun hanging out with him and strolling around San Francisco with him for the first time. He took me the Westfield shopping area there and looked at many clothes that we couldn't afford. Eric kept encouraging me to buy a really expensive shirt in Bloomingdales. Afterwards, we ate at the food court there. I found it hard to find what to eat since I was only able to eat something soft and warm. I started scooping in some mashed potatoes and gravy as well as some steamed vegetables and Swedish meatballs on the side. I spooned in a pint of clam chowder as well since most of the food was too hard to chew and swallow down.

Unfortunately, I ended not not being able to eat half of the food I bought, which was pretty pricey. I soon realized that eating salty foods became so painful that I started to well up tears while I was struggling to eat. As a result, I couldn't drink the clam chowder or the gravy. The mashed potatoes were also a bit salty, so I started scooping it with the steamed vegetables so it was tolerable to eat. Afterwards, we took the BART back to Berkeley to his apartment.

I found his apartment very homey and bigger than the dorms (well, obviously). Because I was ignorant and lazy, we ended up working on my course schedule for fall semester. I regret ever doing this the night before, no fun at all. But after changing some courses around, I had a rough and back up schedule in case the classes get full. I felt bad though since I took alot of Eric's time to work on the scheduling and listening to his opinions on some of his classes. I was very grateful though for his help. Without it, I wouldn't have a nice schedule and I would have probably freaked out half the time when I have to reserve classes.

After finishing the schedule, Eric was nice enough to walk me back to Unit 3 that night. Which I must emphasize, was probably one of the scariest nights I've ever experienced. Living in a suburban town (as Jason dubs it a surburbia maxima), I never had a problem walking out at night alone since it was safe enough to do so. As I walked down a block with Eric, I kept walking either really close to his side or behind him. There was one point when I had to hold his arm because there was a hobo standing relatively close to us and talked about us.

After Eric dropped me off, I slowly came in the room and went to the bathroom to shower. I felt really bad since I had to keep unlocking and opening the door to gather some things that I forgot such as soup. I slept around 2AM that night.

The next day was the official CalSO day! I got ready, slowly ate breakfast and met a new friend from the College of Engineering. It was nice meeting a person from SoCal and somewhere nearby (Torrance). He invited me to eat with him and his friends, so I agreed and followed him. It was nice meeting different people and starting over with a clean slate, although Josh was amused by the fact that I was part of a show choir in school. He and his friends found it abnormal for me to eat oatmeal and actually like it. It was in a sense tolerable, but it was the only thing I could eat because of the continental breakfast. Continental breakfast equals bagels, donuts, muffins, ...in general just alot of bread that was solid and painful to eat. Just to save some embarrassment, I told them that the oatmeal was very good and pushed the fruit to the side since it was too painful to eat that as well.

After breakfast, everyone met up with their counselors. Later that day, I decided to ditch CalSO since my mouth continued to hurt more to the point where I didn't want to interact with too many people since alot of people means that I would want to talk more. So after dinner, I called Eric to meet up with him to hang out and wrap up my course schedule. I don't remember much of what we did, we talked about high school experiences and people we encountered. It was a nice talk since I got to know Eric more.

The next morning, Cafe 3 actually served real hot food for breakfast (yay!), so I stocked up on eggs and oatmeal again. CalSO was fun again since our group bonded more and we knew that we would have a class together in Chemistry 4A (as well as suffer together...). So after we said our goodbyes, I met up with Eric again to eat lunch and hang out at his apartment again. I was able to make a deal with him and treated him dinner at Tomatina, which was pretty good for the price. We then took the BART/AirBART where he dropped me off at the Oakland Airport. We said our goodbyes there and I was off back home!

Overall, I really enjoyed NorCal more than I did back at Cal Day in April, except the hobo part. I guess it was cause I felt a little less intimidated by the campus since I was able to meet much more people and bond with alot of classmates from different parts of the state (well, most of them were from NorCal). I was also able to get to know Eric more, who I found a pleasure to spend time with.

So any updates lately? I bought myself a journal so I could write in some random thoughts or meaningful poems or what not. I soon found it very useful to rant and scribble around my feelings. So if you find that I don't write enough here in this blog, you would know why.

My mouth infection is also healing since I am able to talk and eat alot better than I did at CalSO. It was a pity though that it didn't get better before then. Oh well, it's better than not getting better at all!