disalarming

There are two cousins on my mother’s side that are the closest to my brother and I in age. This is both fortunate and unfortunate: fortunate because we all get along really well and have lots of fun when we get together, and unfortunate because it is too easy to compare our accomplishments (as we are in such similar places in our lives. Comparisons are inevitable when part of an Asian family, but it’s kind of pathetic when you come off as the underachiever because you actually are one in comparison. Take note, for example:

• Cousin 1: Multilingual (Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, English, Shanghainese). Certified to give piano lessons at age 15. Youth Group leader. IB student. Slated to receive a bilingual high school diploma. Athletic.
• Cousin 2: Multilingual (see languages listed above). Qualified for the official Shanghai youth soccer team. Youth Group leader. Guitarist. Very athletic.
• Brother: Bilingual (Cantonese and English). Maintained aquariums as a hobby. Knows how to drive manual. Certified lifeguard.
• Me: Trilingual (Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, English). Slated to graduate from college in a year with a bachelor’s degree. Baker. Accomplished cross-stitcher.

There is one thing my brother and I have undoubtedly in our favor, however. We are taller. (Lame, but we take what we can get.)

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

Last night, one of my roommates and I went out to a local club. The pickings were slim; most of the male crowd fell into one of the following categories:

• Old Asian men who should have left the club forty years ago
• White men who were looking to pick up Chinese girls
• Men (of all races) who just stood there on fringes of the dance floor, too terrified to do anything but chain smoke cigarettes

Still, we thought not all was lost. At the very least we could try talking to some of the Chinese men by the bar in an effort to practice our Chinese, and perhaps score a free drink or two, right?

Wrong. The first guy we approached on the dance floor had no interest in dancing with us at all. We moved on pretty quickly from him, but further observations led us to discover that the guy didn’t want to dance with anyone at all. No, he was perfectly content bopping along to the music on his own, which is more than unusual in a club setting.

The next guy we approached turned out to be a dud as well. It soon became clear that this guy had no idea what he was doing in a club scene. He didn’t offer to buy us drinks. (Which is his right, of course, but unusual, particularly in the Chinese club scene.) In fact, he asked us why we had no drinks, but in such a way that it was a genuine question – no underlying meaning was applied to the question. He was not a good conversationalist, and he seemed to not understand anything we said as we had to repeat sentences several times for him to comprehend what we were saying.

It got to the point where we were clearly getting nowhere with this guy, as our time talking to him was more painful than anything else. Not to mention that we couldn’t enjoy our night out as two single girls if he followed us like a shadow. When we told him we (making it clear that “we” was my roommate and I, he was not included) were going to go to the upstairs bar, he followed. We then told him we were going to go to the club next door, once again that was met with an enthusiastic, “Let’s go, then!”

It took all of our evasion tactics to lose the guy. Our attempts to evade him culminated in us hiding in the bathroom for half an hour with him patiently waiting for us outside. In the end, we made a beeline for the dance floor from the bathroom and managed to lose him for a bit. But then he found us again, at which point we decided to call it a night and head home. This guy was persistent, and as our entire night thus far had consisted of trying to lose him and failing miserably, we were not going to have a good night.

I still can’t believe he didn’t pick up on any of our hints and signals. Some of them were subtle, many were obvious, but they all had the same glaringly obvious message: you are boring and we are not interested, so please leave us alone.

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

In seventh grade, I stayed awake for a solid straight 35 hours. Never beyond my wildest dreams did I think I’d be able to stay awake for so long without sleep. I proudly informed my younger brother of my accomplishment, who was as awed as I was.

In high school, my brother stayed awake for a solid straight 36 hours, thus beating my “record.” He informed me that once he made it to the 35 hour mark he thought about sleeping and tying my “record,” but he decided he wanted to beat me. He only stayed awake that extra hour so he could brag about his 36 hours over my 35.

Well, his little feat ends today, because this weekend I stayed awake for a solid straight 38 hours. And you know damn well that I got through those last two hours on sheer determination to beat my brother’s count of 36 by not just one, but two hours!

Don’t be so surprised by my insistence on staying awake when I could be doing far more productive things, like studying or homework or housecleaning or planning an upcoming adventure. After all, what big sister can afford to let her little brother best her in a situation like this?!

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

I am a firm believer that if you search the Texts From Last Night website hard enough, you will be able to find a text that can sum you up in, well, a text. This belief is affirmed by the countless times a text from TFLN has popped up in my Facebook news feed due to a friend writing it on another friend’s wall.

This is the text from TFLN that sums me up in a nutshell:

(314): In case you were wondering, you weren’t dreaming. I really did get stuck between my bed and the wall last night.

I actually have that text in my “About Me” box underneath my profile picture on my Facebook profile :P

(For those who are wondering: yes, I have gotten stuck between my bed and the wall before; I had to get a friend to move the bed so that I could get unstuck. It was pretty painful at the time but it makes for quite the story!)

Question of the Week: Have you found a text from TFLN that pretty much sums up who/how you are?

(Thanks to everyone for the well wishes for my mom. Her surgery went well and the whole family is very thankful for that.)

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

Most of the time, I handle myself with grace and poise. I’m pretty capable in almost any situation, which is good because a lot of awkward stuff happens in my life every day. However, today my “recovery” ability completely and totally failed me, much to my embarrassment and the hilarity of those around me.

First of all, I should explain that in one of my classes, there are 2-3 people who are registered for the class but never actually show up. They were in class on the first day of the semester and took the midterm, but that was it. My class is unusually close and we are all good friends with each other, so we’ve speculated where these kids have been throughout the semester.

So, picture this: I walk into class and one of the kids who never shows up is sitting in the front row¹, strumming a guitar and humming along. I am so totally and completely taken aback by this that I burst out laughing before I realize what I’m doing. But seriously? When someone doesn’t show up to class in forever and then does so with a guitar in hand, it’s kind of hard not to laugh.

The other kids in the class know why I’m laughing, obviously. We’re all close and we’re all on the same page; we’ve all tossed around elaborate and outlandish theories as to why this kid, as well as the few others, even bothered registering for this class and then not show up at all. However, obviously Guitar Boy doesn’t know why I find the sight of him with a guitar hilarious.

Me (trying to stop laughing as my friends try not to start): Oh. Well.
Awkward silence ensues. All of my classmates and I pointedly avoid making eye contact with each other.
Guitar Boy (putting down his guitar): Wait, what’s so funny?
Me: …it’s raining outside?

Yeah, I don’t know where I came up with that either. But that made everything seem 100x more hilarious and everyone dissolved into howling laughter, leaving Guitar Boy confused as ever as to what, exactly, was going on.

Also, thank you to all those who congratulated me about my scholarship! I still can’t believe that all my hard work paid off and I actually got it!

1. Incidentally, he happens to be a really, really pretentious kid. Like, he never shows up, but when he does, he acts like he’s better than everyone else. Obviously, he hasn’t really made friends with the rest of the class. [↩]

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

Meg posted her bracket in the March Madness Cake vs Pie Tournament, so of course I wanted to fill out a bracket too.

It was a lot easier to decide the cake half of the bracket than the pie, which probably means that I enjoy eating more kinds of pie than I do cake. Wedding and birthday cake confused me because there are so many kinds; in the end I interpreted wedding to be white cake and birthday to be yellow. I had a very hard time picking between pound and bundt and went with pound in the end only because I’ve eaten it more than I have bundt.

In the pie side of things, it was difficult because my favorite pies were pitted against my all-time favorite: apple. Lemon meringue is my second favorite kind, so it was very sad to see it go down against apple. I would have liked to put blueberry and cherry against each other, but cheesecake beat out cherry. As much as I love cherry pie, it can be kind of a hit-or-miss depending on the cherries used.

I am very pleased with my Final Four and the results of my bracket. Obviously apple and red velvet would face each other in the end (anyone who knows my dessert eating habits well would have known that from the start). As much as I love apple, there’s just something about red velvet that gives it a little edge over apple. It’s probably because I’ve never had a bad slice of red velvet in my life, whereas I have encountered some mediocre apple pie before.

Go team Red Velvet!

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

In an effort to steer away from complaining about having to study for exams when all I can think about is packing and getting everything in order for me to go home, I thought I’d share this clip. This is quite possibly my favorite commercial ever. Old Spice has a brilliant marketing team!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE

The last line cracks me up every time!

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

I never once imagined I’d be shouting “Don’t leave me! Come back, come back!” in an overcrowded dining area as one of my friends left me. You know how when people pretend to walk away from you just to make a point? Well, those people usually come back after taking a few steps away from you. This friend, however, didn’t. He kept marching away and went out the door without a look over his shoulder.

He left me distraught by the entrance of our cafeteria, where I was getting some very strange looks from those in the middle of eating for my dramatic theatrics.

If anyone can guess what happened for said scene to occur, they get a (to be determined) prize. The answer will be revealed in my next entry.

Here are some hints about what the situation involved:

• Study abroad
• Three boys
• Speaking Chinese
• The definition of loyalty
• One increasingly distraught girl (me)

It also was actually a very amusing incident for everyone but me as I was, um, distraught, so I’m excited to see what people come up with as a plausible explanation!

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve been in a perpetual state of stress because of a project I am working on and will undoubtedly continue to be stressed until the deadline passes at the end of this week. So, in an effort to both ease my nerves and bring some laughter into everyone’s day, I decided to share this awesome clip.

Alice posted this gem on her blog a while back and now it’s my turn to repost it and share with everyone. I just finished marathoning Merlin season 2 over winter break, and my gosh, how I heart Bradley James and Colin Morgan (who play Arthur and Merlin respectively).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDpOhLFVN2Y

LOL, what hilarity. They’re both so awesome :D

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.

I have no trouble talking to my mom on the phone to keep in touch when I’m away at school, but my brother is a different story. He’s the type of person that is only good to talk to on the phone if there is a specific reason for calling and sees absolutely no need to make “small talk” when there is an awkward lull in the conversation. Most people have a general sense of when it’s their turn to bring up a new subject in a conversation or prompt the other with a question, but my brother has absolutely no qualms with one-word answers and shrugs. He also has zero interest in my life, all of which make phone conversations with him very difficult.

Our conversations over the phone usually go like this:

Me: Hey, how’s everything?
Brother: Good.
M: Yeah? How’s school?
B: Busy.
M: That sucks. Lots of homework?
B: Yeah.
M: Things good with your friends?
B: Yep.
M: How’s Mom?
B: Good.
M: Tell her I say hi, okay?
B: Okay.
M: How are the dogs?
B: Good.
M: Well… I’m glad to hear everything is good with you. Take care, okay?
B: Okay.

Color me surprised when I called home yesterday and we talked on the phone for two hours! No, that is not a typo – we did talk for two hours. I don’t even think I’ve talked with my mom for that long on the phone! As much as I loved properly talking to my brother, I know that this two hour conversation is a one-off. No doubt that next time he and I talk, it’ll be back to those one-word answers…

Cross-posted from breakthesky.net. Please leave any comments there.