大塘小鱼

Trying to remember the Kaplan 500 GRE vocabulary has been the most productive part of my life in the past two weeks; and the task is made more tolerable by a fancy gadget--the Ipod Touch.

After preparing numerous documentations and a long wait, Japan visa is finally approved, and will be mailed to me next week. The truth is that if I had known that the visa process is so tedious, I probably would not have applied for this USD2500 grant at all. But now that everything is in order, I will try to make the most out of this trip. 

Weekend is 3 days long.  Having decided that I don’t need the help of the alarm clock, I wake up at about 10am everyday, and then spend a lot of time sitting in front of my laptop, ridiculously refreshing web pages over and over.  Watching NBA Playoffs consumes another big chunk of my time.( The Rockets and Celtics wins today thrilled me.) The frequent trips to the gym these days seem to be paying dividends, but the tradeoff is that I become constantly tired.

In fact I have lots of work to do.  It is just that I am consciously evading them. The Economics Professor, Maggie has asked me to start the summer research project, but she is in Australia right now, and the project apparently involves some complicated programming that Maggie is probably not aware of.  I cannot do anything yet even if I wanted to start the project badly; and I don’t really want to start the project, not just yet. It is also time to start preliminary research for my economics thesis,on the urban-rural income divide and the Hukou system in China, but I have been postponing that too.  It is not until today that I got myself to start reading a new book-“Hiroshima, The World’s Bomb”, a discussion on the moral implication of the bomb.

Summer is going to be busy. Senior year is going to be busy. I need to make adjustments to my life.

         The headline in the world right now is H1N1/Swine Flu/Influenza A; the class I am taking for Short Term is Cancer Biology; the Japanese drama I am watching these days is 「神様、もうすごしだけ」，（神啊，请给我多一点时间），which is about a girl who is infected with HIV.  The underlying theme of short term for me, therefore, is death and disease.

         I can talk about the relevance of Cancer Biology to my life all day long, but the truth is that I don’t really want to study for it. No, not right now, in the fabulous spring weather of Maine, at a time when hardly anybody on campus is motivated to study. This is Short Term. The good thing is that, doing poorly in a short term class doesn’t affect my GPA---that explains my lack of motivation.To be fair, Cancer Biology (My first biology class in 6 years) does promise to teach me something about the disease, which I may find useful later in my life. According to the lecture, 1/2 of us are going to develop the disease some time in our life…

        The grades for the winter semester are out. No surprises, and for all the stress I suffered from over the course of the semester, I deserve those grades.  One more semester of decent work, and I will have a spectacular transcript when I apply to graduate schools; two more semesters of work, and I can get out of here! 

        The prospect of graduating is getting more real by the day. Lately I have started the painful process of memorizing vocabulary for GRE examination. The good thing is that I don’t have to take a subject test---one fewer thing to worry about. I have also been trying to read some essays in Japanese on my own. The fact that I am done with a Japanese minor here somehow motivates me to start working on that language again. The progress over the past year, if there was any, was unimpressive, to say the least. I am trying to make a habit of going to the gym and do some weightlifting, and, playing basketball, mostly on my own.

        Spending too much time watching NBA playoffs lately. Every game of Houston vs Portland series. Most of the 7 games of the Boston-Chicago series. And it looks like I will be watching every game of the Rockets vs Lakers series too.

       Life is good, as long as there is no work. 

     Winter Semester ended last week with a birthday party. With a general demand to party and get wasted on the night of the last finals,  there was a big turnout for my birthday party: too big perhaps for my ideal birthday party. I can’t really complain: that was the biggest birthday party ever. I woke up the next morning at 8 am with a hangover, and went to say goodbye to two friends: one is leaving for the week, the other for the summer.  To think about it, there will be many more goodbyes coming up…Next Monday, after short term…

     To say that the semester was disastrous is probably an overstatement.  The grades are going to be  good, and the only thing that didn’t  turn out well was the internship. In the face of the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression, it wasn’t a big deal, not to mention the fact that I didn’t want to spend too much time hunting for an internship.  Nevertheless, the semester put an unhealthy amount of pressure on me. I am starting to think that I have been too demanding on myself.

      As a rule, the most interesting class of a semester is always the class from outside my usual field of studies.  In the past semester, it was Psychology 101. It was interesting to learn about the various theories about behaviors and personalities, and at the same time, to apply the theories to learn more about myself. On the last day of the class, I did this simple personality test in class, and was surprised by how well the result describes me.   You can try this test at http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp.

This is my result:http://typelogic.com/intj.html

        Daylight Saving Time began today. The weather is getting warm. The mountains of snow on campus are melting away fast.  We are finally seeing patches of grass again. The air gives hints of spring.  Yes, it probably will snow again before the real spring, but everybody is enjoying the warm weather while it lasts.   After the past 3 or 4 tiring and frustrating weeks, I am happy to see the change in weather. This winter has been depressing, and I hope it ends sooner.  After putting much effort, I have finally solved, or figured out a strategy to, the many challenges of the semester, and got over the recent failures.  It is not going to be easy, but there are only 5 weeks or so left in the semester. Getting more uncertain about the future day by day.

The plant in the room which I bought 2 years back suddenly decided to bloom, in this freezing weather. But of course,  the plant probably cannot distinguish the season given that the temperature in the room is almost constant. Nevertheless, a pleasant surprise. The blossoms are lovely.

Roommate is still suffering jet-lag after flying from Nepal.  For someone who goes to bed at 3 am on average, going to bed at 10 pm is quite a change.  Because I am taking Abstract Algebra at 8 am on Tuesdays and Thursday, I am forced to go to bed early, too.  Suddenly,  the occupants of this room are living very healthy lifestyles.  For the first week, at least.

Work is already piling up.  An Economics class and Physics class are both teaching about the Calculus of Variation, a term I haven't come across till now. A strange coincident that it is popping up in both classes now. This is the inter-connection between Economics and Physics I have heard about all along?  Anyway, the classes do promise some interesting stuff to come.  At least, the Japanese class should be more useful than that of last semester.   I decide to take Psychology 101 as Pass/Fail to avoid destroying my GPA.  I am searching for the rhythm of the semester again.

The weather is cold, and everybody has been complaining about it.

Monday is Martin Luther King Day, and classes are replaced by special workshops. In effect, a three-day weekend. Tuesday is Inauguration Day... Time for a CHANGE.

It has been a long wait, but 2008 is finally over.  It has been a very eventful year for the world. To me, these events are depressing in general.  In any case, in the future, we may look back and discover that 2008 is the year when the world order fundamentally changes, for better or for worse.

On a personal level, 2008 has been far less dramatic. This is possible the result of being in a 4-year program. I didn't have to worry about graduation just yet, and was able to enjoy a quiet year.  I watched tons of Japanese drama. I was thinking that maybe I should rename this activity "the study of Japanese language and culture" to make myself feel less guilty.  Two busy but definitely successful semesters, a  short term, a summer of research, a short stay at home,  one trip to Montreal and another to San Francisco pretty much sum up my year.  If things go well, I may appear as one of the co-authors of an article in a professional economics journal in 2009. That is one unexpected development in 2008. 

Looking ahead, 2009 is bound to be a very challenging year.  The myriad of courses, applications for internships, economics honors thesis, physics thesis, GRE... It is going to be very interesting...

In flight now.

I left my uncle’s house at 8 am. It is now 10:36 Eastern Time. It is another entire day spent on traveling. I can’t wait to get back to my room now. Since uncle and aunt wake up early in morning and go to bed early, and the house is not heated, which means that the room is much colder than my room at Bates and that staying up late is more difficult, I just follow the time table of uncle and aunt. As a result, although San Francisco and Lewiston Maine have 3 hours’ time difference, I was basically living on Eastern Time. I expect myself to have no trouble adjusting to Eastern Time.

After the initial worry about the weather in San Francisco, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the weather was good for the last 3 days of my stay there. San Francisco was indeed a small city and I was able to explore much of it. Along the coastline, I walked many miles, from a place of interest to another. Often, I allowed myself to stray as some interesting building, etc, appeared in the distance, just to find out what it was. After that, I would then try to figure out where I was on a map, and go back to my agenda of the day. Because of this, the almost new map I got from uncle was in a terrible crumbled state at the end of the six days. There is a problem, however. The mountainous nature of San Francisco makes the perception of distance unreliable. Especially if you are standing at a higher altitude, you will perceive a building as closer than it actually is. Nevertheless, I was able to discover by chance some interesting places of San Francisco, such as Little Saigon, and Teochew Huiguan.

It has been a nice trip, and uncle has been really nice to me. In fact, his caring attention made me uneasy at times. But I was deeply impressed by his effort in taking care of his wife, whose health is worse than his (both of them are in their late 60s or early 70s.)

I am now ready to go back to Bates. A good amount of work is waiting for me at Lewiston, Maine. Goodbye, San Francisco.

PS. The weather in Maine is freezing cold. We are going to have a snowstorm tomorrow. If I picked tomorrow to return to Bates,  I would have been cursing right now...  So grateful for that.