I should have been disappointed with my trip to Atlanta. Instead of sightseeing, I was stuck listening to my parents meet with old schoolmates they hadn't seen for over thirty years.
One story stuck in my head. My parents' friends had stayed in Vietnam for quite a while--it was profitable for them and they didn't want to go to another country, to learn another language, to start up from scratch--until 1978. Yes, it was the year of the Vietnamese boat people.
They paid $200 to escape south Vietnam in a small boat crammed with refugees. They sat hip to hip, unable to get up or move, and were given gruel for sustenance. They lived in fear of the pirates who would board the boats to take the pretty girls into slavery and prostitution. They sat for days in their own refuse resulting in festering sores and death. Some people went overboard into the sea.
Halfway to the rendezvous point with a larger vessel, the passengers aboveboard saw something out in the sea. A pale woman with long curling white hair stood above the waves beckoning the men to come to her. He (my parents' friend) heard her whispering, cajoling. Frightened, believing it was the ghost of a dead woman who had drowned in a previous boat crossing, he cowered on the deck while he watched other men leap over the railing to their deaths.
Was this really a ghost or the result of mass hallucination? His wife accused me of not believing although I said nothing to contradict her. I'm sure something must of happened to make normally sane men drown, just not the appearance of a siren ghost.
1. Are you dreaming now? How do you know you are, or how do you know you're not?
Nope, not dreaming. I'm pretty sure I'm not dreaming because reality doesn't abruptly change. Usually when I'm dreaming, I'm not aware that I am.
2. What's going on that really makes your life a source of wonderment?
I'm always wondering how lucky I am. Life could be a lot worse.
3. Why do you think you're here, and where is "here" anyway?
I'm not sure. I'm not philosophical or spiritual or religious. I find it a waste of energy to ponder the whys and hows of my existence. There's other things to do.*
*Stay tuned for tomorrow when I talk about ghosts.
It's hot. It must be the humidity. It's surprising how much you forget about a place when you haven't been there in a while. It's also surprising how much home doesn't really seem like home when you've been away. It's my parents' home now. Everything is alien, like trying on a different shoe that looks like yours but really isn't. My old room--I can't feel comfortable working there because I feel as if I'm invading someone else's privacy.
But my main complaint is that it's hot. The atmosphere, using my Mom's term, cooks. The clouds always look bilious. It wants to rain but doesn't--a bloated Venus. Wearing lots of clothes? Insane. Wearing as little clothing as possible? Also insane. Exposed flesh is mosquito fodder, and I'm the most awful mosquito fodder there is. My skin swells red in an area the size of a grapefruit. And it doesn't itch. It hurts, like hell. It's almost as bad as my allergies during September.
Being "home", I realize that I miss diversity. Although I didn't quite fit in on the west coast, I blended somewhat. Here, I stick out like a sore thumb. Whenever I have to talk with someone, I hope desperately that the first thing out of their mouths is not, "Do you speak English?" Everything here, though, (except the Chinese food) is cheaper, and I guess in my mercenary mind makes it mostly better.
I'm proud to say I'm not turning into a couch potato. I only watch the television when my Dad remarks, "Oh, the news is supposed to be on in a couple of minutes." Then I spend my time making fun of the local journalists, Barbara Walters, and the intervening car commercials. Even if I wanted to watch the television, I would have to interrupt my grandmother's Chinese soap opera watching marathon.
So see you after the weekend. I'm escaping to Atlanta.
Yes, but mere words won't change the perception that women should be held to higher standards yet treated worse.
2. After reading the above article, most questions seem trivial; however, isn't something like this beyond toleration/acceptance of "other cultures ways of doing things?"
There is no question that it's beyond toleration and acceptance.
3. Explain your yes position on question # 2, and tell us what should/can we as individuals, or nations do about it? If you answered no to question # 2, tell us why we should should close our eyes to injustice in other nations.
In the first place, they're not treating women as even being human. What do they expect us all to be, paragons? I'm not saying that we should trash an entire culture but that they should change with the times. Adultry is wrong, but it's a mistake that every human being has the potential to make. And making mistakes is human.
I don't believe invoking higher powers can justify anything, because when you cut right down to it, the decision is still made by human beings. We're prideful, self-righteous creatures and injustice should be examined in any situation by someone outside. If we're too close to the situation, we'd get carried away, unable to see past our noses.
In the morning, before the sun reached the roof of the trees, the men came for the kitchen floor.
The floor was tiled in white and blue flourishes. Pretty. But it squeaked when a chair was dragged over it and its shiny gloss smudged under the oils of bare feet. The men were here for the floor and they did not care that many years ago, two giddy children picked out the tile because it was pretty.
Even before noon, it was hot. Muggy. Windows were pushed open, but it wasn't roiling breezes that came into the house. Only stilted air. The air stuck to the skin, even when the skin was drenched with cold water and vigorously toweled dry. Moist, sticky. Everything felt like chewed bubble gum underneath a shoe.
The men worked shirtless, gleaming. Their drills and saws roared over the dog next door who barked wildly at these strange men. They even roared over Mahler's paunchy symphonies which exploded with sopranos and tenors, the clicking keyboard, and even the large fans attempting to shove the stagnant air into action.
Then the men were gone, leaving only a dusty wood smell promising that they would be back the next day to finish the job. Half of the white kitchen floor was torn away leaving bits of wooden plank and a hole that had the exact width of a dishwasher. Down the hole was concrete and a trickling of light. The basement.
In about two hours I will physically be an ex-Techer.
For the last time I will hear the buzzing grass trimmers and see the hallowed halls of Lloyd House. (I never did get to paint that mural, but I suppose if current Lloydies wanted to do the hieroglyphics themselves or change the idea completely I wouldn't mind. I'm an ex-Lloydie, after all, and ex-anythings usually don't have a right to dictate what to do. The yellow wall , though, seems appropriate somehow--the very basics of the basics, yet unfinished.) Today is the last day of last days where I see students hunkered down on computers playing the latest game or the Southern California sun spilling down through the line of olive trees. It's the last of many things.
Yet I don't feel sad.
Perhaps I'll feel fonder of the past four years the further I'm away from them. At the moment, I'm not sure how I feel. It's all a muddle of ambiguous impressions that are so intertwinned and mixed that I can't sort them out at all. When I say, I don't know, I don't mean that I'm apathetic or that I can't make up my mind. I just need distance and time to stop me from thinking of what could have been.
As for what will be, I'm excited and nervous. Scared. Don't let anyone tell you that chosing a path at the crossroads of their life is a piece of cake. It's hard to be sure and confident once the path is chosen. It's not that I regret saying, "This is what I want to do" or even "This is what I'm probably going to do," but it's terrifying to realize that the course has been already plotted through the desert and there's no more leeway, at least for the next couple hundred miles.
It feels like it was just yesterday that I checked into Caltech at the housing office, the gruff woman at the desk slapping a tiny envelope into my hand that contained a room key. And when I opened the door to the room, I had realized that my very first roommate was a disaster--underwear and clothes draped everywhere, pots and pans on bookshelves, and the books on the floor--and when I was heading in to attempt to clear a space for myself, she was heading out with her new friends to buy $200 worth of make-up at Macy's.
And now, my last roommate has headed off to boot camp before she enrolls in a military medical school in Maryland. The rest of my friends have mostly scattered, some staying in California, others also heading out east. No one in between though (making me wonder if middle America even exists). If anything, living in SoCal has made me realize that I could never be truly happy here. It's not my irrational dislike for palm trees or the weather or the insane working conditions. When I first arrived, I thought I could fit. But it's only been a "sort of." I can wear the sparkly silver shirt if you asked me, but it wouldn't be me.
My singular piece of luggage is impossibly heavy. I've packed too many things. But I'm going. Going. Gone.
1. What is your favorite freeware program? If you don't have have one you might want to check out some freeware sites. There's still a lot of good stuff out there that's free!
I've checked out a lot of stuff like browsers, P2P file-swapping systems, FTP clients, graphics utilities, and other programs, but they don't compare to the eye-candy that is Chime. Okay, so it's technically not free, but you can get the plug-in and visualize chemical and biological molecules in 3-D (among other things).
2. Do you think the way the internet has changed the world is essentially a good thing? Why or why not?
Definitely a good thing. Like jf, I think the research aspect of the web far outweighs the spam, pop-ups, and other crass commercial tactics that we have to put up with.
3. Is there something that's really bothering you these days? It might be personal, political, scientific or just downright kinky. What is it?
Today? Nothing except whether or not my suitcase can fit the remainder of my belongings. I'm no longer working (at least for a few weeks anyway). All the snarky people who've been in my face are off to vacation--in fact, if I'm lucky, I'll never see them again. I'm going to take my mentor's advice and not think about science until grad school begins. Life is good.
This morning I stuffed my poor clunker of a computer into a cardboard box and carted it off to Central Recieving and Shipping. I knew I was a bit of a junkie when I realized I missed how I had arranged my desktop just so or how I had organized my files.
But I have other things to do than to lament my emptying room. I've been reading--attempting to whittle down the stack of books with me now (finally finished Tom Jones, whew!)--because when I get home, I know I'll have a bunch of other books I've left on the shelf which I haven't cracked open yet like Anna Karenina, The Dispossessed, and even So Long and Thanks for all the Fish. And of course, I'm using these precious few weeks to write like mad. So don't worry if I become a bit sporadic this month.
Lies, deceit, grudges, temper tantrums, personality clashes. I watch as this toxic sludge oozes out the sides, perilously creeping close to my sneakers. Perhaps this is why I build a wall around myself so that no one really knows who I am--or perhaps more accurately, I contain myself so that I'm not the match that ignites the pile of explosives lying close-by. I worry when people get angry because they don't seem to care who they hurt.
True, this apparent pettiness is Not My Problem, but when someone asked me to join the fray I'm close-lipped and non-partisan. I don't take sides because I'm a coward. I don't even try to mediate either, otherwise, I'll be Luke trapped in the Death Star trash compactor.
I see but don't do. Am I avoiding the real world? I am almost lackadaisical, perhaps even lazy, when it comes to social problems. I distance myself from them. I hope I'm not the student who glories in the destination and fails to look around and discover that the palace is actually a pile of rubble. Besides, I somehow always wind up being the soundboard for everyone else's problems. Maybe I should become a psychologist.
In other overheard conversation: Some scientists speculate that hickeys are overzealous teenagers' way of marking mating territory. Sort of like mindless dogs marking every other tree. Ew.
The bus driver was giving me evil looks as I hauled some boxes three times my size onboard. Hey, it's not my fault that the people who have cars are too busy to drive me places.
A Reader's Manifesto. Someone once described me as imperturbable. Well, I suppose that's right. I don't get angry or crazy visibly--I'm not prone to violent moodswings. So I'm not surprised that a critic is bashing "high-brow" literary fiction as pretentious, bad, and incomprehensible. All he's trying to do is to create a stir in the writer's world. I don't read literary fiction very often, but I wouldn't go so far as to regard all of it as trash.
I'm more of a "low-brow" genre reader myself. Check out my current bookrolling page (links also easily accessible on the chrono page) to find out where my interests are running nowadays.
The people at my lab threw a farewell party for me. The chocolate cake that was the centerpiece had the words, "Good luck Thea", iced on top. And there were strawberries. Although I'm more suspicious that everyone was coming to eat the food rather than wishing me good luck on my future endeavors, I'm sort of relieved that the PI (primary investigator or the guy who runs the lab) didn't show up. I (and perhaps the other people too) would have been nervous and tongue-tied. I'm sure he had other pressing engagements, but what can you say or do around a Nobel laureate who also happens to be the president of Caltech? Besides, I'm 90% sure that he still doesn't know who I am.
Anyways, I found the whole thing funny as conversation rapidly degenerated from making puns out of "Hanover" to debating chicken semantics.
I still don't know what the descriptive word for chicken is.
On the other hand: The Testudine and the Leporine. It may not have the word for chicken, but it has words like bovine, piscine, and ovine. The Hobohemians. An article on a fascinating lifestyle--not that I want to be a hobo, of course.
Ever woke up in the middle of the night with a dream you just had to jot down? Mine wasn't particularly interesting (although certainly vivid) or scary--but there was something about it that actually made me get out of bed to write at 4:30 AM. It's probably my subconscious screaming at me again.
I found myself in a wide-open grassland with a merciless sun. A copse of trees dotted the far background. I was on a golf course.
There were two golf tournament coordinators: a man with a slick salesman smile named Hansolm and a con-woman whose alias was Soface. Hansolm was giving my group a tour of the first hole while a woman in my group (who happened to be a professional golfer) was counting up the adults in the group. I was at the end, behind four kids, and was labeled the thirteenth adult. The professional golfer then dominated Hansolm's attention by telling him that she was using the tournament to exercise her elbow.
After the tour, we flew back to the hotel in Hansolm and Soface's private jet. We passed over a shopping center which consisted of a 24-hour Wal-Mart and an abandoned warehouse that used to be owned by the tournament coordinators. My hotel room was painted-on beige stucco. Cheap. There was a single flimsy curtain on the window which I pulled away to reveal a scene of the street below, the office building next door, and an Arby's. Room service gave me shrimp and mashed potatoes for dinner which I ignored. Someone had put a leather couch in the bathtub.
The next day, I met up with other people in my team and we picked up baskets with colorful golf balls. But they weren't golf balls. They were plastic Easter eggs, and a chunky angry-jowled woman (who was apparently our coach) told us to put them back. Soface asked us what song we should sing for the Easter egg hunt and one guy replied, "Hail to the Queen." Instead, a fresh faced six-year-old girl danced around Soface screaming, "Hop, hop, hop!" while twisting her arms together. Calmly, Soface told us, "She can also frighten her own classmates."
1. Is honesty always the best policy? Relate a plausible scenario where this might not be the case.
Honesty is the best policy except in emotional situations. I may not be emotionally involved myself, but I always try not to make some offhand superficial remark (no matter how relevant it might be) to hurt someone's feelings. For example, if a friend explicitly asks me how they look in a new outfit and I don't like it, I lie. However, the best way to avoid lies, though, is to say nothing at all. That's the course of action I take most often.
2. Are you someone of who can't say no? If you're not, tell those of us who are, how to overcome the yes syndrome.
I can say "no." Sometimes I wonder if I'm saying "no" too often. I think the trick is to think of yourself first. Be selfish.
During the weekend, I spent some of my time wandering around Pasadena City Hall and the Norton Simon Museum. Sometimes I don't realize what I have in the backyard until it's too late.
City Hall had been empty. The only people I saw were a few casual tourists who flitted in and out of my vision like illusions. I stood at the central courtyard surrounded by domed turrets. Beside me, a fountain crackled with water. It was as if I had wandered into the middle of Sleeping Beauty. What was a fairy tale doing in the middle of yuppie city? But I didn't question it. Perhaps for a moment or two, I had been transported into an alternate dimension.
Maybe it's summer getting to me. I spend my time alone (or at least in my mind) far too much--making me drown in introspection. I'd like to think that there's no such thing as too much imagination, but when I have to jerk myself out of a daydream I wonder if I'm maladjusted.
The Norton Simon Museum was fantastic. One man had managed to assemble a diverse set of art in the latter half of his life. De Zurbarán, Rembrandt, Matisse, Picasso, Degas, Giorgione, Van Gogh. And the largest South Asian exhibit (mostly multi-armed Hindi gods and goddesses) outside of Asia. As usual, I felt a bit grubby among the well-dressed patrons murmuring pretentious comments and the chic art students scribbing furiously in their notebooks (after all, I had just escaped from lab in a pair of splotchy jeans and a rumpled t-shirt)--but art, well, it honestly made me forget everything else around me. Again.
I'm currently packing, not my suitcases (not yet), but the cardboard shipping boxes. In about a week, I'll be leaving California.
I don't feel sad. Instead, I'm eager to get back home. My summer job has been milking me of my energy and patience and has become even more consuming as my time here runs out. It's a perfectly horrid way of ending my four year stay.
When I was about to embark to college, worrying about living away from home (as I was going to move the furthest away in my high school class) and adjusting to a whole new set of people, everyone told me that I'll be having fun. Frolicking on the beach. Turning myself into a valley girl. Experiencing west coast culture.
Never happened.
My expectations never materialized. Now, people are asking me, "Are you going to miss here?" I could snarl like the stereotypical bitter Techer and reply, "Are you kidding? No! I'm glad I'm getting as far from here as possible." But that wouldn't be me. I'm not sure if I'll miss it (or the opposite) but I do know one thing. Memories from the past four years will fill me with regret.
What have I done? Hardly anything. I haven't visited the places I wanted to go or seen the people in those places. Instead, I've punished myself with working and studying and getting unhealthy untanned skin. There were opportunities that I passed up to do something that had a modicum of excitement for sleeping in. And what do I have to show for it? A scrap of paper that looks virtually identical to everyone else's scrap of paper.
I realize I can't turn back time, but that doesn't mean that I'm already set in my ways. How can I be set in my ways if I detest the boring and tedious?
The morning is sunny with a hint of dew. Small breezes buffet him to and fro, unceasingly changing their minds. Laughter trembles the air. Schoolboys are on an outing to catch bugs in an empty jam jar. He instinctively scrambles up the lifeline.
And clutches the branch, afraid, as it shakes.
Links: Theban Mapping Project: Very thorough. Gives an entirely new meaning to armchair traveler. Cell Biology: I admit cell phones do have their uses, but I detest them all the same. They ring every ten seconds because people have found a new way to annoy and waste time. I'm even considering trashing my regular phone (I've already disconnected my answering machine years ago) so people don't bother me at home. I am deeply possessive of what little free time I have and absolutely hate it when someone tries to take it away from me because they believe I don't have anything better to do except doing their stuff.
