Last summer, I spent a couple days of refuge at the library of US International Trade Commission (to avoid some unpleasant distractions in my office). During those couple days, I would be the sole wanderer in the narrow aisles of that stuffy and small library. Always having this natural attraction to old books and manuscripts, I sought out the oldest looking annual reports of US international Trade Commission. And from those aged and untouched pages, I learned the little known fact that the US international Trade Commission used to be called US Tariff Commission, and it was sometime between 1970 and early 1980s that it changed name. What a funny change, I thought to myself then. It is a totally trivia knowledge. That is, until yesterday.
So a professor in my school is looking for certain old tariff data (around World War II), and while the post 1980 data is widely available, he thought that he had to march all the way to Washington DC to US international trade commission in order to photocopy the 1947ish old data from hard copies manuscripts. Having spent some wonderful memories in the USITC library, I just thought that it probably ain’t worth that effort to go there for those manuscripts. So I did an advanced search in my school’s library for “International Tariff Commission,” which should be the author of periodicals dating back before 1970s. VIOLA. Found. They are located in a dark, dark corner of the basement of the library.
In the dim light, I saw that on the rack is an amazing array of tariff schedule manuscripts. Some dating back to Civil War!
And so that’s how it went.
My bones do not listen to me. I’m genuinely annoyed by the fact that my body is so inflexible. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have noticed it. But now that I am on my 3rd serious ballet lesson, I realized that out of about 10 women and 1 man in the class, I am the most inflexible!
My ballet class is so slow that it goes like a yoga class, where the predominant amount of class time is devoted to stretch excercises. Whenever the instructor told us to lean down to touch the toes, or lean down to touch the floor, or to do butterfly (press knees down and lean down), I would look at the mirror and I would be the single head popped up with body. The only part of my body that is leaning down is my head. Everybody would be waist down on the floor. I mean, for goodness sakes, even the 40+ women who had babies already are down on the floor (as well as the single male)!
So I went online to search for how to be more flexible. Then I see all these youtube clips of 6-year old telling me how to do a split. Yeah, right.
But ballet is sort of like yoga. The point is to be flexible. After my first lesson, I went home feeling like doing an upside down arch on the floor the whole week. Or just turning my whole body upside down. It’s sort of wierd how simple stretches can make you feel.
Can trying to be flexible become addictive?
PS. I display the following picture, borrowed from the site of “first day of Yoga” to demonstrate what I meant, by people’s head and waist touching the floor in my ballet class (in the following picture, it’s yoga).
Filed under: Musings
Yesterday, my classmate’s wife trusted me enough to let me play with her 5-month old baby. And so I did. I took him and went around the room meeting nationalities of the world.
The curious thing, very curious thing, about the baby is that he doesn’t kiss properly. When he tries to show his affection to his mother, he just opens his mouth, making some “MUHHH MUHHH” sound, and sticks it onto his mother’s face. Sort of like licking, with his mouth wide open. And he repeatedly did that. His mouth is still on his mother’s face. And he only does it to his mother (not stranger like me).
And so I conclude, if babies don’t know how to kiss, it means that kissing is not natural.
Filed under: Musings
Every week, something speaks to me and points me to one consistent message throughout the week.
For example, last week, the message that unexplicable forces point me toward is:
“Do not overestimate your power to establish causal links; please give CHANCE a big role.”
This week, the message is:
“Do not underestimate the power of a good picture: a nice picture says it all.”
These two phrases have much implications on everything I do: in how I deal with life personally, how I do research, and what research I do.
Every Friday, I talk to an “advisor” whose advices I am growing to appreciate by each week.
Today, she explains to me why “manners” in talking, or what I interchange with “being fake”, is an important thing to do, and why it overwhelms whatever altruistic benefits you assign to just being blunt (most people will be 0 or negative benefits; but for some reasons for me is positive; but I am learning it’s negative).
Analogy: in a wolf pack, wolves survive by having manners to other wolves.
This post continues a series of post which will document the beginning loss of naivete of yours truly.
Masterpiece theatre broadcasted Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’uberbille last couple weeks. And towards the end, the friends of the heroine wrote a cryptic letter to the good guy’s family, saying “Beware of an enemy disguised as a friend.”
This warning in fact should be applicable in real life. As I observe and think, not just believe, I suppose that there are indeed a couple possibilities of such people. We all have ambitions and when they conflict, people do whatever they can to advance themselves in the real world. Might as well. Fair enough. We are all selfish homo erectus constrained by the scarcity of resources.
Yet the stupid thing that I do all the time is to make the same mistakes of trusting people and saying things that should have been said to only people I trust.
Once I begin to doubt people’s words, I also begin to doubt their motives. Yet I have faith that I can still be a happy person despite becoming an untrusting person because I will only trust a selected few people. That should have been what I should be doing all along…now I hope it’s not too late.
How does one get used to saying things that one does not believe in such that one makes others feel pleasant and comfortable? How does one withhold one’s tongue for saying things thats one feels is correct and fears that the other person does not know yet could potentially affect the other person? After this winter break with family and conversations with various friends, I now realize that practicising this task is an absolute priority in getting my character in shape. Doing this task well could help advancement in life, in general. If I don’t do this, family members and some will convince me that I am stubborn, which is another trait I am trying to correct.
According to the “How to communicate” book I read over the weekend, one has to do 6 steps of enhanced listening to really get to the emotional layer behind people’s words; one has to ask oneself: What is the aim of his words? Why is he telling me this? What is he trying to tell me?
Here’s my selfish fantasy:
Oh why can’t people just be homogeneously more insensitive. It is because there is such a mix of sensitive and insensitive people that makes life so difficult for either type of people. When insensitive people naturally act insensitive because they simply could not emphasize with why the other sensitive person would take offense, the sensitive person would get offended but wouldn’t tell the insensitive person this because his/her sensitive instincts instruct him/her that doing so would make the the insensitive person take offense,! And the sensitive person would avoid the insensitive person, and then the insensitive person feels bad and actually still continues to be clueless because the sensitive person does tell him/her what he/she did wrong. Here both sensitive and insensitive people got hurt. Life becomes complicated.
Insensitive person told the truth which hurts the sensitive person. The sensitive person gets hurt but would not tell the insensitive person what went wrong, thus not incurring face-to-face damage but incurring long term damage in the insensitive person’s life.
If only life were simplier, so we can take each other’s words as they are — no extra interpretation. Just take it as it is. No need to read behind words, decode the emotions behind the words. What you are saying is exactly what you are telling me.
A result of my personal endeavor to try to think like a sensitive person is that I am beginning to stop believing in what people say. When people say, “that’s nice” — they are just saying it to make you feel better. It is disgusting and sad.
Which leads to another personal struggle for this new year — to smooth out the ups and downs of life. When people say something that makes you happy — you don’t need to feel so happy. Vice versa, when people say something that makes you sad — you don’t need to feel so sad. Emotionally, practice feeling calm and immune to BOTH ups and downs of life (not only down). Afterall, you really don’t need to take people’s words so seriously.
That sounds very scary, doesn’t it? It does. Especially if that face belongs to you! This is the punishment for my materialism for buying the PROACTIV facial treatment package after seeing a TV commercial. My right arm developed some skin irritation last month, and now it left a huge dark mark on it. When the irritation began, it showed symptoms of what my face is today. Extremely fearful that my face would turn into that dark spot on my right arm, and especially after reading all the symptoms after doing a brief online research of allergy to PROACTIV and feeling that I want to tear off my skin, I called the school health care center.
Today is my lucky day. I called the student care center at 4:00pm, and got a last minute appointment at 4:25pm as somebody cancelled. (Normally it takes a week to get an appointment! Not to mention that you don’t get to see a real DOCTOR…you only get to see a nurse practitioner). Furthermore, I got to see a REAL DOCTOR! (on the car it reads that he is an assistant professor in medicine!).
I seized the chance to ask my doctor 2 other symptoms that is unrelated to my beehive face. One is this black bump that developed between my eyes, and the second one is a long lasting skin irritation on my right arm.
Today is my lucky day, because according to the doctor:
1. “You don’t have cancer!” He said to me with regard to the dark bump in between my eyes. (yes…I had wondered if I had cancer….seriously…after 2 years of extreme stress. And I didn’t even mention cancer to the doctor, he mention the word by himself ) According to him, it is a “cyst”, which will go away in “about a year or more.” When I heard the latter phrase, I nearly dropped to the floor.
2. “You need to make an appointment to see the student counsellor.” This because I told him about my sleeping problems and I wondered whether it has to do with the series of problems I had lately.
The doctor became my primary care doctor (I never had one, now I have a good one, I think!).
You know, I always believe that good things happened out of bad situations. In bad times, you realize how bad things are and you snap out of it and correct the wrongs. It’s kind of like the economy — it is in bad times that all the stuff that made the subsequent good times fall into place as the bad get erased. The worse it gets, the brighter tomorrow will be.
Of course it is easier to say this. One would never wish to be in that bad situation in any case.
Filed under: Musings
The first real snow of 2008. It happened a little past midnight on December 1st. The lights were already off, the curtains down. And I heard it before I saw it. I was already snuggled up in bed, half drifting off with Dostoevsky’s “Brothers Karamozov” in my hands. Then I heard some tinkling at the windows in the bedroom, as if Tinklebel herself was tapping at the window pane. I jumped out of bed and lifted the curtains, then saw the miniature house in the garden of my neighbor house covered in white. The little playground around it paved with white. Misty white as far as one could look to downtown. The many pieces of snowflakes carelessly undulating in the December winds of Chicago.
The next morning, there was no more wind, only left is the quietness of the aftermath of a snow storm. I quietly treaded on the soft carpets of silky powders, on the quiet streets.
Some weddings are priceless. Although the Chicago-LA plane ticket can buy me a flat screen TV, this wedding — that of an old friend, one of my first friends, and the first person in US who ever gave me a Christmas present — cannot be substituted by any material goods. So I spent four wonderful days in Los Angeles, seeing family and catching up with a lot of old old friends, but most of all going to the wedding.
This wedding is special, because it is the FIRST of all the high school friends, those who grew up with me. I am hard suppressing my tears during the vows, although they tried not to make it sentimental. What with all the reminisces, catching up, picture taking, not the whole experience is thoughtless happiness. With all that brightness is also that glaring wariness. The fact that nearly every friend is followed by a guy and several wearing glittery diamonds and talking about their career reinforce the feeling that everybody is moving on, that I must move on as well. It is altogether a different world from the one which I am living in.
But the wedding was not the only thing in these 4 days of LA that really struck my heart. While the wedding was the bright star of those 4 days, I found out about an extremely depressing news. That my father’s best friend died in July. I had dim-sum with this friend of his just last Christmas! When my Aunt continued to tell me a string of death news from other people, I just could not help to be taken over by this sadness. Of not being able to feel certain that your loved ones will live to see you get married.
If that is one fantasy very dear to my heart, and one that is again rekindled by my high school friend’s wedding, it is a daughter/Dad dance at my own wedding to the following song, which my Dad and I shared since I was young. And I will always get weepy eyes when I hear this song.
Unforgettable (Nat King Cole, and his daughter, Natalie Cole)
