jennyloonoo

Passion

2012-02-10T00:19:00.000-08:00

Today, I really started to think about how I've been held back by my own concept of passion. I've always associated passion with something that you must excel at. If you're not good, at something, why be passionate about it? But, this is limiting in that you can never become good at something if you are not passionate to begin with.

For a really long time, I've been feeling as if I have zero interests, and no prospective interests because I'm really just not good at doing much. I've noticed that for the past few years, every time I get an idea, I give up before I even start because I always set up these insurmountable mental roadblocks for myself. It's always some variation on, "There's someone out there with more experience/more qualified/smarter than me. Why should I even try?"

It really is a defense mechanism I use to circumvent inevitable disappointment and anxiety brought on by my fear of anything unfamiliar.

There are just so many things I've given up on because I knew I wouldn't be able to be the best- violin, piano, learning Chinese. I've always been concerned about how other people would see my accomplishments or lack thereof. It's like I never did anything for myself, to simply want to continue just for the sake of somehow enriching my life. This particular paradigm that I'm stuck in is really hard to get out of because I'm comfortably uncomfortable being this extremely limited, uninteresting cardboard person.

Time to expand the realm of possibility.

obsessions, putting off reality

2012-02-09T00:33:00.000-08:00

fangirling all week for yonghwa. omg.

When did life become so convoluted?

2012-01-31T22:58:00.000-08:00

Things:

Had my first speech in public speaking today. In my entire life, I was under the impression that any formal speech given without note cards was to be committed to memory. Apparently! that's not the case. I spent like three days memorizing my entire speech, just to find out that this is an "extemporaneous" speech where you prepare before hand, but don't do any sort of memorization so it comes off more colloquial. Oh the horror, as an Asian, I'm incapable of that. I got to the front of the room and tried to change my speech on the fly without forgetting the whole thing since I memorized it based on trigger words in the previous lines. I sounded like a broken robot.
When did life get so convoluted? Everyday, there seems to be some kind of new component or new thing to consider. I like this to a certain extent, but then there just gets to be so many things swimming around in my head, so much so that I can hardly think straight and stay focused on anything. Work, class, PCAT studying, trying to volunteer afdjsfkjasdkfasd. My TO-DO lists are basically just shit shows with a million impractical things I can never cross off.
I really need to sleep earlier. I've been averaging 6 and a half hours a night. That's way less than I slept in college. I don't even notice it anymore, and I always wake up before my alarm. I only get really tired while driving home in traffic. It's getting dangerous.
Why do so many people buy cars with only two doors?
I'm addicted to the internet. gimme gimme gimme. Must replace missing real life social interaction. It's a distraction from a distraction from distraction. I swear, the other day I was checking my email, reading an article on serotonin, and looking at shoes at the same time.

RUT

2012-01-07T23:34:00.000-08:00

I am quickly and inevitably falling into a huge rut. I'm experiencing holiday/friend withdrawals.
Some of the questions that I'm facing:

What am I doing with my life, and what can I do to enrich it? The only things I have are working to earn money, shopping to spend that money, and Newton.
How do I make new friends? I feel trapped.
Why am I so deluded when it comes to my perceptions of self?
Am I slowly slipping into unconsciousness in my daily life?
What the hell?

End of the year post

2011-12-22T21:29:00.000-08:00

With a blog, I think it's always hard to find your voice, and to say what you really mean. In my own personal blog-reading experience, I find it awkward when people are too nitty gritty real, and frustrating when they are too cryptic. It's difficult to find the balance between revealing too much and too little. I'm writing this as if I have a huge readership, when I know for a fact that I am my biggest and oftentimes only reader. This little nugget of realization is actually helpful, because it suggests that I should be writing this straightforwardly for myself rather than for the Internet. Here goes.

This year passed by so quickly, and so many things happened. Moonwalking with Einstein suggests the the more events you have anchored in your memory, the slower time seems to pass. My experience with 2011 seems to be an example of the contrary, but what I really think is that everything that's happened hasn't caught up to me yet.

My Dad died. I'm really not sure what to say. I'm just going to leave this here to grow.
Chris and I broke up. It's only officially been around three weeks since we broke up, but for both of us, the last six months were really just leading up to this point. We were together for around two and a half years, and pretty much half of that time was spent more than 500 miles away from each other. It really begins to feel like you're living two separate lives, and it becomes increasingly difficult to share experiences and feelings with each other. It just got to a point where things just weren't the same anymore, and we just didn't feel the same way we did back at Berkeley, or even when he first moved down to San Diego.
We adopted Newton! Even though we've only had him for three months, I seriously can't imagine our house without him. I love him so much, even though he's a troll and is always trying to steal whatever I'm eating. I also think that he's tried to chew everything in our house at least once. He's like a giant baby that I take care of, except he's fine if he sniffs his own poop and drinks dirty gutter water once in a while.
I graduated from college. College was a magical time. It truly exceeded my expectations. I am really thankful that I was given the opportunity to get a great education without having to worry about how I was going to pay for my tuition, food, and a nice place to live. I met some really great people and some super shitty ones that I hope I'll never have to run into again. College was fun and exciting and super challenging, but at the same time safe and protected from realities. It'll be hard and most likely impossible to ever come back to something like that again.
I got a real-life, real-money paying job. Even though I hate going sometimes, I feel super lucky that I even have a job to go to everyday. Our lab is super small, it's just me and the PI, so it gets really quiet and tedious sometimes. The hardest part though, is going to work everyday for 8 hours while still keeping my goals in mind. I usually just come home and do nothing, and it's hard to really motivate myself. Further complicating this, I'm not really sure what my goals even are these days.

My main goal for the new year is to just get myself together. I've been neglecting a lot of different aspects of my life, and I really need to regain consciousness of everything.

You've got mail.

2011-11-30T22:02:00.001-08:00

I love this movie. It's so sweetly archaic: their little AOL inboxes, Fox Books as Borders (RIP). One of my favorite non-holiday, holiday movies.

Hand cream.

2011-11-24T23:01:00.001-08:00

The French obviously don't know a thing about what it means to have really dry, cracked, scabby, borderline eczema hands. This hand cream is no good.

Sure, it's fancy and makes your hands smell clean like a freshly diaper-changed baby, but it seriously does not work if you probably have a genetic proclivity towards ashen hands, and your job requires you to wash your hands every five minutes in the dead of a socal winter.

I'm going with the Norwegian shit next time. They know what's up.

Just a smudgeness

2011-11-20T22:34:00.001-08:00

The ending killed me.

Traffic

2011-11-15T20:13:00.001-08:00

With all the time I sit idling in traffic before and after work, I swear I could become a professional traffic analyst, if that's even a real job. If it's not, it totally should be. In my very knowledgeable opinion, the number one cause of traffic is MERGING. It makes me so mad when people purposefully exit the freeway just to blow through one traffic light and then merge back onto the freeway to save a few seconds by bypassing a small section a cars. If they were smart like me, they'd realize that this is only contributing to the problem and slowing everyone down even more. Grrrrr.

I am really adept at stalking people on fb

2011-11-12T22:26:00.001-08:00

Seriously though. I should turn this into a career. I think I would make a really great gossip columnist. Like... Gossip Girl for the non-new york socialite crowd, and more for the crowd that is made up of the 60 people that actually agreed to sharing their personal information with me on Facebook. I could even start my own celebrity gossip site, or not, you know, since that market has been pretty much been cornered by gay dudes and ohnotheydidnt.

On an unrelated note, I'm watching a new drama called "Flower Boy Ramyun Shop", and I actually watched it while eating a bowl of ramen today. Yeah, that's pretty much sums up life these days.

Nighttime rituals

2011-11-07T22:57:00.001-08:00

1. brush/floss teeth
2. remove residual eye makeup left over after shower
3. goop that will supposedly make my eyelashes longer
4. face lotion
5. acne gel that bleaches my towel, but does little else
6. hand cream for my 19th century washer woman's hands

I'm about to eminently fail my online econ exam.

2011-10-31T21:28:00.000-07:00

I have a million more pages to read, and my bed time is effectively in one hour. I keep reading the same sentence over and over again. All I'm processing is that there's apparently a hypothetical market for chai tea lattes...

I feel sad that this isn't college anymore, and I can't stay up until 3 to scoot by on a mediocre grade. I'm sleepy.

I'm seriously reconsidering the whole pharmacy school thing. I feel like it's just a compromise- something not too intense, but will afford me the lifestyle that I want- good pay, good hours. But I'm not sure if in the end, that's really what I want to do with my life. In considering alternatives, all I see are road blocks. For example, my original plan: med school? First of all, one of the letters of rec I was planning on getting is from a pharmacist. Not going to work. Secondly, I'm not down for residency and basically having zero time for living. Thirdly, I'd probably fail the MCAT. These are super petty reasons, but alas, I'm a petty person.

On top of these reservations, I'm super discouraged in the way of pharm school because I realize that it's going to be really difficult to work and finish all the classes I need, and even then, there are a lot of schools that are already closed off for me because I wasn't a chemistry major. I need to take a biostats class that covers multiple regression if I want to apply to Michigan. The only class I've found is through UCSD extension, which requires prior knowledge of SAS programming. Yeah, I have no idea what that is. Can't I just get my calculator to do everything? It also costs $695, and it's an online class. Not happening.

All I know is that I really want to keep learning about things I'm interested in, which is clearly not economics at this point. Maybe grad school is in the future? But honestly, I don't see myself as an academic (HAH, what a joke), or working for some biotech company that is liable to lay me off at any moment.

Maybe I should just be a research technician for the rest of my life -____-

Soy Candles

2011-10-02T17:11:00.000-07:00

Whilst browsing the glade plug-ins aisle at Target today, I overheard a mom telling her daughter about all the dangerous chemicals in Febreeze, and if she wanted her room to smell better she would give her a soy candle to light. And I thought, dude, how pretentious- thank goodness someone invented febreeze so I could wear my clothes again without washing them. But then I wandered over to the candle aisle and found these two gems. Soy candles, of course- they smell so awesome. I promptly put down the chemical laced glade scented oils + the warming fan. Hooray, something to cover up Newton's dog smell. =]\ --- OMG Newton just typed that, no joke! Randomly pressed keys really close together on the keyboard or smartest dog ever?

2011-09-28T22:17:00.000-07:00

i've been working for a grand total of three days, and i already feel like i'm falling behind in life duties. after being drained by after work traffic/car battles, i hardly have time to do anything before it's already 9, and i'm starting to feel sleepy. how is this going to work when i grow up, with real responsibilities?
regarding the list of personal goals posted a few days ago: total and utter failure. i'm on the internet more than ever, i've only read marginally more, and my laundry is still in the dryer from last weekend -_____- I keep telling myself that I'm just going to have to do more chores over the weekend. the dyson that i convinced my mom to get off of woot last week should be coming soon! that should motivate me to do a little vacuuming. i hope it's the wonderful, life changing experience that other people tout it to be.
i've been parking in the wrong lot at work. hopefully they don't catch me because it's much more convenient. this reminds me of when we would go to work with my dad when he still worked at scripps, and he'd park in the structure that overlooks the torrey pines golf course and the ocean. very bittersweet stuff.
newton is a booger. i wish i could send him to boot camp. where he wouldn't get older, only wiser.

Unsettled

2011-09-24T21:59:00.000-07:00

I've been feeling uneasy since yesterday afternoon. It's an ugly feeling in my stomach. Yesterday, I attributed it to the uncertainty of the UARS reentry. All I could think of was the premise of Dead Like Me, where she was killed by a falling toilet seat and then was subjected to a life as a grim reaper. But the whole falling, obsolete satellite thing was totally overblown in a totally understated way.

Training Newton is proving much harder than I thought it would be. He's overactive and doesn't pay any attention to me when I want him to. I bought him a bully stick (i.e. bull penis... gross), and he loved it so much that when I took it away, he even went into his crate to look for it. He still pulls like crazy on his leash. I don't think he cares whether or not the strain on his throat is uncomfortable. He'll just gag and pull some more. I also bought some shampoo for him since I want to give him a bath tomorrow. It was really more expensive than I thought it would be. Equivalent to a bottle of Fekkai.

I rearranged my room because my mom said that it isn't good to have your bed oriented in an East-West fashion. The new configuration doesn't quite follow feng shui rules as gathered from Feng Shui for Dummies. I have a partially obstructed view of the door.

Personal Goals

2011-09-19T22:53:00.000-07:00

1. Read more.
2. Use the internet less.
3. Train Newton to be a good dog.
4. Watch Shawshank Redemption
5. Get some new cowboy boots.
6. Do laundry on time and stop leaving it in the dryer.

Today my toe nail fell off

2011-09-06T23:23:00.000-07:00

It was about time! My toe looks all bald and sad now.

I finally organized my room today, and it took forever to decide where things would go. There was so much stuff that I had just been toting around with me from our old house before I left for college, then up to Berkeley, to various different apartments in Berkeley, and finally to our new house like a freaking turtle. I got super frustrated because I would look at something and get nostalgic, stuff it somewhere, and then turn around and hate myself for keeping something that really has no use whatsoever. I kept thinking, what I am going to do with this in the future, and if I keep stockpiling these precious mementos, how many boxes of useless things am I going to have in like 20 years? I'm conjuring up terrible visions of Hoarders. Worst nightmare. I also swear I found an old journal with an entry entitled "Reasons why I hate myself" For serious, that stuff existed before I tore it up and threw it away in embarrassment. I have absolutely no regrets when it comes to disposing of all evidence of teen angst.

When I'm on Twitter and I see funny/insightful/awesome things tweeted by celebrities and other famous twitter entities via retweets by my friends, I feel like I'm using twitter incorrectly. So then I try to follow a bunch of celebrities/other famous Twitter entities. I usually get really annoyed because they tweet way more than the average person (case in point: Zooey Deschanel...) so I unfollow them after like a day, and I'm back to using twitter incorrectly again.

I also watched Something Borrowed with Connie today. It was really bad.