I always make the wrong decisions

Home Sweet Home

Being back at home is somewhat bittersweet. But there are somethings I have really missed, such as:

1) SARATOGA! I love the darkness of this little city and how the moon and stars light up the night instead of street lights. SD is too yellow and bright all the time.

2) My freezing house. I am almost always cold. My house is also about 5 degrees colder than it is outside, so I'm always dressed like I'm going to hibernate. Strangely, I've missed the cool-ness of my house; the crisp air is somewhat refreshing.

• My piano. I've been teaching myself to play piano for some time now, but I never really have that much time to learn. I still enjoy occasionally jumping on the piano to play the one or two songs I know though.
  
• 2-ply toilet paper. I know people mention this a lot, but I never realized how superior 2-ply is to 1-ply. When I use 1-ply at SD, I always have to use a bunch and it feels like sandpaper. Unpleasant. :[
• Conserving h2o. Did you know that it takes about 1.6 gallons of water to flush the toilet once? Everytime I shower, I collect the cold water in a large tub while I'm waiting for it to heat up, and use that to flush the toilet. It feels so wasteful to just flush all the time at SD.
  

3) My room. Words cannot even describe how attached I am to my room. For all my life, I have done everything in my room; it's my little sanctuary, somewhere I can escape to at any time. When I came back, I found out that my mom turned my room into her closet, and there was even a mah jong table set up in there. I was unusually upset that my room no longer obtained my personality, and ended up sleeping in the living room the night I came back.

• My rifle! My arms have gotten exponentially flabbier since I stopped colorguard, but I like to sometimes just pick up my rifle in the corner of the room and spin it for a bit. Something about smacking my hands with a piece of wood until they're red and the sound of a strap snapping against wood is appealing to me.
• My weighted hula hoop. Every night, I would use a weighted hula hoop for half an hour as I watch TV. It's supposed to trim your waist, and having not used it for 3 months, I've definitely noticed the difference as I now look like a tree.
• Disney channel. I freaking love Disney channel. It is probably my most watched channel but stupid SD doesn't have it! gahhh

4) 24 hour fitness. My gymmm! <3

• Kickboxing! I started kickboxing when Janet and Eunice first introduced it to me. It's so freaking fun! We developed a tradition of going to kickboxing on Saturday mornings and then The Movable Feast afterward. Although our tradition died out when both my old gym and The Movable Feast have closed down, I still enjoy going to the one in Sunnyvale.

5) The Prolific Oven. This is my favorite bakery. Everyday after I work out, I buy an iced tea from here. I've been going there for years so everyone who works there knows me. I was so happy when the owner saw me the other day and instantly said, "Iced tea?" Yay! It feels good to be remembered.

6) Old friends + my seestar. There's not that many people I'm close with, and half of them are from back home. It's the best feeling in the world to be reunited with close friends and family. Yaaay I love all those I have in my life :D

/edit

7) DRIVING. I don't know how I forgot to mention this. I'm not a very good driver, but I love driving around. It gives me time to think or sing in the car, etc.

I like The Weepies

especially this song

"Gotta Have You"

Gray, quiet and tired and mean
Picking at a worried seam
Itry to make you mad at me over the phone.
Red eyes and fire and signs
I'm taken by a nursery rhyme
I want to make a ray of sunshine and never leave home

No amount of coffee, no amount of crying
No amount of whiskey, no amount of wine
No, nothing else will do
I've gotta have you, I've gotta have you.

The road gets cold, there's no spring in the middle this year
I'm the new chicken clucking open hearts and ears
Oh, such a prima donna, sorry for myself
But green, it is also summer
And I won't be warm till I'm lying in your arms

I see it all through a telescope: guitar, suitcase, and a warm coat
Lying in the back of the blue boat, humming a tune...


...o!!<

Maybe I made the wrong choice

Most people who have known me for a while know that going to UCSD has been my dream since the beginning of high school. When I didn't get in, I appealed right away. The second time I appealed, I gathered 400 signatures from people around school [this guy from collegeconfidential got 300 signatures and it worked for him] and random people from Library Walk when I visited, and personally handed it to the director of admissions at UCSD; I even stood in front of my choir class and announced it. I think this is unlike something I would normally do, but I like to prove people wrong, which could also make it characteristic of me. I still didn't get into UCSD though; but that's why I decided to go to CC instead of UOP. I was determined to transfer within a year, despite all the crap people gave me about it being impossible. I did all my research and got a head start by working hard my second semester senior year; the semester that people usually slack off on. I got a 4.2 GPA with 5 class in high school, 4.0 in 3 community college classes out of school, worked a job, and had sports.

Everything I've done in my life has always been very extreme. If I study, I either don't study at all, or study nonstop. I'm either really happy or really sad. I either eat a lot or don't eat at all. I've been pretty consistently extreme in going to the gym and being determined/motivated though. Anyways, my point is that my life has always been on either one end of the spectrum or the other; there has never really been an in-between. I only had some stability for a few years when someone was there to balance out my craziness, but now it's back to being a roller coaster again. I made too many mistakes and didn't treasure what I had and really underappreciated this person, so I want to take this chance to say thanks to all those who have been putting up with me.

Another degree of my extremeness is my OCD-ness with schedules. I've always liked to have everything planned out; essentially every minute, every hour of my day is thought out at the end of the previous day or the beginning of the next day. I always knew I wanted to go to UCSD; I knew since 5 years ago that I wanted to be a dentist. I know where I want to go to dental school, I know where I want to work, I know where I want to live when I grow up. I always took pride in always understanding myself well and knowing exactly what I wanted and why I did things a certain way.

For the first time, I'm not sure. Did I really make the right choice in coming to UCSD? This has been my dream for so long, but it's completely different than I imagined. I'm so disappointed in the way things turned out, especially after all that I've sacrificed to get here. I'm far more lonelier than I have ever been in my life. I wonder if I would have been happier going somewhere else.

A factor contributing to my loneliness is that I'm extremely introverted. I don't think that I'm naturally like this, but I've become more closed off these past few months. I find it extremely hard for me to relate to people, so it's not easy for me to make good friends. But when I do, I really think highly of those people and value them. Unfortunately, these feelings are not reciprocated. I've been particularly upset with one friend lately, and I'm not sure if I really should be. I feel hurt and underappreciated because this person does not treat me as a friend at all. I really begin to doubt if we were friends in the first place. Is it really his/her fault that I am not liked as much as I want to be though?

Do I always have one or two people I can rely on? I really can't say for sure. I'm putting my heart out on my a silver platter, hoping someone will reach out as well, but it's bound to be knocked over. So I'm not going to reach out and let myself be so defenseless anymore.

Like I said, I don't like to give up, so don't worry about me; I will be fine.


...o!!<

P.S. This post has ended up being much longer than I expected. If you read through all of it, congrats, I'll give you a cookie next time.

I have bus-ing issues

I have an ochem midterm on Tuesday, and I don't know sh*t. So obviously, I'm blogging instead of studying... yes.

According to Tomisu, I "bus retarded". It also doesn't help that I have a terrible sense of direction and get lost practically everywhere I go.

Example 1:

When I was here for orientation over summer, I left for Ralph's at 11:00 P.M. with a bus schedule and detailed instructions on how to get back [aka which bus stop I should wait at]. I was standing in the check-out line two minutes before the bus was supposed to arrive, and DASHED to the bus stop with sharp box corners stabbing my leg and milk gallons attacking me too. When I got there, the bus was nowhere in sight, so I checked the bus schedule at the stop; apparently it was supposed to come 20 minutes later. Lame. So I waited and waited and finally got on the bus. I thought the bus was taking a different route to go back to the apartments, since I've only bused back to campus before so I was unfamiliar with the apartments bus route. After a while, we're in freaking downtown La Jolla, so I'm thinking, "This is DEFINITELY not right." I ask the bus driver if this bus goes to Regents Court Apartments, and he says "Oh noooo, you're on the wrong bus." So I get off the bus at walk across the street and wait for half an hour in the dark [alone] at 12:30 A.M. I finally got back at 1:30 A.M., an hour later than I said I would.

Example 2:

After nerding it up at the library until midnight, I decided to take the campus loop shuttle back since I live across the freaking country [aka campus]. Since I didn't want to wait in the cold, I took the counter-clockwise bus instead. The bus driver told me that it was the last bus of the night, and ended up stopping in Warren. In the end, I was even further than where I started off. FML.

Example 3:

After another episode of studying at S+E Library until closing [I know, my life is pretty epic], I walked to the campus loop shuttle stop. I saw another bus waiting at the stop, but I thought it wasn't campus loop, until I got closer and noticed that the bus said "UCSD" on it. The bus almost left without me since I took such a long time to get there, but the nice bus driver let me on. We get to the Northpoint stop right next to where I live, then the bus drives AWAY from it. WHAT? So I ask the bus driver if this is the campus loop bus, which he responds "Oh noooo, this is ____." Great. So I ask him how I can get back to campus, and he tells me that he'll be going back to campus anyway. I ended up riding in the bus for a full circle around town and some guy getting off the last stop even asked me, "You're not getting off?" Although the bus driver was off-duty, he drove me an extra two miles to drop me off right in front of my apartment. :] So nice!

Example 4:

Today, I was waiting for the bus to come. When it came, I got up and stood right in front of the open doors, about to go on. Then the doors shut and the bus freaking drives away?! I had to chase after it like a freshman, quite embarrassing.

So yeah... buses and I were never meant to be.

P.S. I finally ordered a piano keyboard! YAAAAY! I've been really wanting one for a while, and I lost the chance to get the one I wanted on woot.com last month, but by some miracle chance, it's on woot again today!

...o!!<

I swear I was going to end up staying up all night thinking of a blog title

Good thing I decided to just settle on "Bookends."

Anywayyy, I have been meaning to create a blog for quite some time now, but I always thought that there wouldn't be much point to making one since no one tends to read these things anyway. But Sarah has inspired me to make one, so here I am!

It's 4:47 A.M. right now, and this may be late for most [normal] people, but I have a retarded sleeping schedule, so I've been having a habit of sleeping when the sun comes up. My sleeping schedule has always been pretty off, but it turned into jetlag status since I got to UCSD. I think sometimes I stay up so late that I figure I might as well not sleep since I'd have to wake up in a few hours anyway. This is probably not good.

Some other things that's been going on since I got here:

I've started to bake a lot. I've always baked here and there back home, but I do it quite often here. During the first week that I got into it, I baked about five times a week.

I keep on doing stupid stuff and embarrassing myself. This is actually not really new; I've often been told that I have weird and interesting stories. For example, one time Ashley was going to come and pick me up, so when she got here, I jumped into her car. Except it wasn't her car. I was sitting in a complete stranger's car and it was really awkward when I had to climb out. I'm sure they were thinking "WTF?!" Second example: I accidentally dropped my water bottle cap into my gallon of water and spent 30 minutes trying to fish it out and ended up drinking the whole gallon.

Thanks to Jonathan, I've started doing Muay Thai. I know I suck balls at it, but I really like it! I've wanted to skip it a few times because I felt uncomfortable and kind of retarded, but I really try to overcome my discomfort and force myself to go. Forcing myself to loosen up and feel less awkward in situations is something I'm working on.

On a sadder note, I lost my heart necklace. For the past four years, I've never taken that necklace off except for when I shower. It is a very personal and important possession of mine, and I'm really disappointed that I was so careless to lose it.

Ahh I don't want to end this entry on a sad note, so I should think of something happy. Except I'm rather brain dead right now, so a smiley face will do for now.

:D

...o!!<


Time it was, and what a time it was, it was
A time of innocence, a time of confidences
Long ago, it must be, I have a photograph
Preserve your memories, they're all that's left you