we've got to practice our skip-its!

Graduation

I was talking to Clare yesterday and we were saying how the fact that we are graduating hadn't 'hit' us yet. For me, I think it did this morning when I read this article in the Daily:

http://www.stanforddaily.com/cgi-bin/?p=1031407

While I think most of us are ready to graduate and move on (if only to Stanford graduate housing), we will certainly be thankful for the experiences we had. I was struck by how many of the things on the list I had already done without explicitly trying to, and how many I did with my draw group. Almost every item makes an memory flash before my eyes--some that I haven't thought about in at least a year. They also missed many things that would be on our draw group list like go to Castro St. for Boba/Pho and find typos in the Daily (there were at least 2 in this article alone).

I am not unhappy that there are things on the list that I have not done. Nevertheless, if there's anything that we want do before graduation, we don't have much time left. Let's do some exciting or mundane things together before it's too late.

i officially coin a new term

edit: in honor of clare's escapades.

"ambiguidate" for ambiguous courting.

Bombs at an airport in Thailand

Looks like I'm not going home for Christmas this year. It feels like the world is falling apart. People losing jobs everywhere in the U.S. Thailand losing control. India's even worse. Who knew that this would be the reason for me to take a stable job with good pay, rather than fulfilling a dream of a more selfless undertaking. Nobody is as secure as we thought we would be.

slick beatz yo!

Boston

I really liked Microsoft Startup Labs! No cubicles or offices, just open spaces and a beautiful view of the Charles River. Nice interviewers. I hope they liked me too.

winnie posted!

I will post as well.

1st post of senior year

West Lag is beauuutiful...and close to the Main Quad to boot

go team!

i think i can safely say 2918 and co have pwnd draw this year.

831

Many among us, including all of those who received the fateful number of 2918 last year, have now received a much happier number. Even though everyone knows it already, it should be kept in the records. :)

rather than working

i've been watching chinese cooking shows again...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moG6x-iGrTk&feature=related

come by for food again :D

omg omg omg

zomgbbqwtf

appropriately asian

At a beach in Hainan:
Drinking coconut juice:

Yeah...Yao requested I blog in English

Woot...1 liter cocktails tonight. It's buy one get one free! Although I think I should only get one...and split it since I'm sick haha


-Tina

Too many things are happening in my life all at once

Ich muss mehr in meinen Blog schreiben.

-Tina

Tandem bicycling and passive-aggressiveness

Happy Easter everyone!

Today I went tandem bicycling with my dad! I was very happy to try that out. Luckily the streets are mostly cleared out because it's Easter, so we didn't hit any cars.

I'm also going to ramble about passive-aggressiveness (passive-aggression? Passion-aggression?). If you read this and disagree with me, I'd also love to hear what you think.

Five years ago, I was with my school choir on tour in Hawaii, and I was rooming with three other girls. All of us had really, really different personalities. One girl was really brash and outspoken (she was Korean-American and criticized Korean-Korean girls for being too "fucking feminine"), the kind of person who would let you know if she didn't like you or if she disagreed with anything you did. Sometime during that tour, we were sitting in our room, and she and another of our roommates were talking about how "fake" our third roommate was. "She acts really nice, but she's totally the kind of person who would backstab you," was their opinion.

I actually was much fonder of the roommate being criticized than of either of my other two roommates. I had been a bit hurt by how the first girl had acted towards me, since she didn't like me much. At this point I asked them, "Don't you think it's better to be nice to people even if you dislike them?" And immediately the brash girl said, "Are you kidding? I've been burned by fake people so many times. I'd much rather know if someone hates me, than have them be nice to me and find out later that they actually hate me."

At the time I wrote it off as an American thing - valuing complete straightforwardness, at the cost of gentleness. It seemed ridiculous to encourage meanness just because it was more truthful. And then a few weeks later, I left a dorm meeting in my house counselor's apartment, closed the door, then noticed a sign on the door, and stopped to read it. From inside the apartment, I heard my proctors (they were a bit like RAs) start talking about me. One of them, who I had thought was really nice and who always seemed friendly, criticized me very loudly, and not in the way you criticize people that you generally like, or even just don't mind. Clear dislike.

Okay, that burned. And yet at that point I didn't believe that people could get hurt without anyone doing anything wrong. So I concluded that the only right thing to do was to like everyone, and then you could be nice to everyone without being "fake."

A couple things happened along the way. First, a Christian acquaintance (who was actually a very angry and irritable kind of person himself, but I think he had a valid point) reminded me that Jesus really didn't like the Pharisees. Second, I came to Stanford and met the first person whom I both disliked and failed to stop disliking. I still wish liking everyone were possible, but I'm sure more practical-minded people are sniggering at me already.

And now an alternative view has occurred to me, and I wonder if this is the right one: Be free to dislike some people, but just don't talk to other people about them. I guess this is merely a reformulation of the general rule, "Don't gossip," except that everyone's so fond of molding the word "gossip" to mean everything that they personally don't do...

Whew. If you actually read this far, thanks for dealing with the baby-sized links in that chain of thought. And do let me know what you think.

*sad

Wow, I can't believe Tina and Helen are leaving!!!

But on a positive note, Helen throws crazy parties.

Shameless basketball plug

Hey guys, you should go to the women's 1st and 2nd round NCAA tournament games at maples. Our team is a number 2 seed so they are good. Also you will be bored during break unless you are in Ireland. I will be playing at the Monday 2nd round game. Also, I might post some pictures from my upcoming air trips. Here is where I'll be staying Wednesday night:

procrastination = blogging

Countdown to the my last days on Stanford campus as a junior......7 days and counting. Today, like yesterday, I did zero work. Soon I'll have to start studying for finals, but hopefully reality will hit later rather than sooner..

My across-the-hall neighbor just said hi to me as he was coming out of his room, and after the normal, "Oh, how's finals week looking for you?" he said, "So....word on the street is that you're an absolute workhorse, that you work really hard and are really efficient." I was like....umm......that's the word on the street??

It's really odd how people get this impression of me. My impression of me was always that I was kind of a slacker.

vincent looks like he's dying from his spicy chicken

Good luck on finals everyone!!

Good luck everyone =)

See you once this marathon is over.

PS--Thank you so much for all the wonderful birthday wishes.