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.
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)
Last year, at the height of the stock market — also at the height of my guilt for not having entered the market for the bull-run — a share of Citigroup’s stock was around $50-ish (one more year ago, it would be around $80 something). For some reasons, I had always set my eyes on Citigroup and thought that if I buy anything it would be Citigroup. In fact, last year I was THIS CLOSE to buying Citigroup.
In the past couple months, Citigroup’s stocks fluctuated around $12 to $25. During the worst days of the market, the price of a share was as low as $11.
But today, it hit a new low (as far as I casually know) — $9.6
This financial downturn just doesn’t seem to end. My laziness last year, last month, and last week saved me.
Filed under: Personal
The captain of a broomball team named “The Invisible Broom” (you know, in honor of invisible hands (Smith)).
To see how stupid this sport is, see here:
While Obama faces historically high expectations, Wendy here is facing historically low expectations on her performance ( Wendy now = Sarah Palin entering the debate).
Where was I on November 4? Grant Park. The park was packed and there was a palpable sense of festivity everywhere I look. It felt more like a New Year’s Eve celebration than a night of election. I arrived at 6:30pm, and stayed until it was over, which was about 11:30pm. They put up screens of CNN everywhere. In the beginning, everytime a new projection came out that Obama leads a state, everybody cheered. In fact, cheers just eruped randomly everywhere. I kept looking toward where the cheers from, kinda glueless as to what was happening.
The cheers was loudest when Pennslyvania was projected to be Obama’s. When North Carolina and Florida came out, the cheers were even louder.
Towards the end (I wasn’t aware at that time that it was the end), when Virginia’s final results came out, and it had turned blue, everybody was just going nuts. Within seconds after that, the CNN anchor said that within seconds, the west coast states would close, and they had this timer that counting down. All of a sudden, everybody was counting down — 10, 9, 8, 7…….I had no idea why they were counting down — then, 3, 2, 1 — then suddenly everybody was hugging each other and was going majorly nuts — I looked up to the CNN screen and saw that Obama’ s electoral counts had increased to 287 from 232 (due to California) and in large bold letters — OBAMA ELECTED! The CNN screen showed Oprah at the frontline. Everybody cheered.
And when Obama finally came out to give the speech, all the people in front of me and behind me were weeping. The whole crowd was silent. And people were putting the hands up high — as if in church, saying hyms. It was a sight to behold.
At the end, the crowd dispersed orderly. I read in another blog of an attendent at the rally that he felt this crowd was different from any other crowds he had seen—that this crowd was reverential. I couldn’t agree more with this adjective to describe the crowd. Keep in mind that this is a huge crowd in tight space, and many of them are African Americans. However, there was no fighting, no commotion, nothing chaotic from beginning to the end. When there was victory, the crowd cheered, but they did not go out to unleash their wild joy by destruction (like in some post-victory sport games). This crowd has a sense of groundedness to it, even after the victory. While the joy in the air is like a New Year’s Eve party, it was also nothing like New Year’s Eve party. People were not drunk, and they don’t jumped on tables. People just came, wept, cheered, and went back home. Just like that. Very orderly. Phenomenal.
Here are some pictures from the scene.
Yep, that was us that the CNN screen is showing….
A sea of people stretching into the horizon.
Filed under: Personal
I dreamed about my little brother yesterday night, but in that dream he walked into a house in his current physical height but walked out having shrank to the size when he was 10. So I asked him, “You seemed to have become shorter,” with my hand on his back, speaking like an older sister.
It’s interesting to witness the progress of my brother’s maturity overtime. You watch him begin to walk, then talk, had the first girlfriend. Then one day, you realized that he actually know more than I do in some area of life.
More recently, I realized that he has been changing to become more like his father. I spoke to him on the phone yesterday. I asked him if we should still stop by Japan and hang around, he said, “I want to get to HK ASAP because I want to fish with Dad.”
Fish with Dad? When did he like to fish? My dad loves to fish, but none of us ever share his hobby. So apparently my little brother has become an avid fisherman, going fishing several days in the week to a creek in Davis.
This is really odd. Going fishing on a regular basis? In Davis? That is really odd.
But it is also quite funny.
Three nice things happened to me today:
1. I recovered the keys I lost at the Halloween party (otherwise, the replacement car key costs $120, due to the fancy microchip component of the key), and I would have need to take the car to a Honda dealership to get the key programmed.
2. I went to a hardware store to get the adhesive remover and razor to remove the waxed serial number and gigantic “car impounded” sign on every car window. I didn’t tell the service rep exactly what I need the tools for, but I described to him the dimension of adhesive marks I need to remove, and the kind of sticker I need the razor on. And he said–not without a twinkle in his eyes and a lop-sided smile–”I know EXACTLY what you are looking for.”
3. The third nice thing happened after I got out of the hardware store happily with the Goo-Gone and razor in my hand. There at the parking lot, I began to raze off the waxed numbers. They fell off almost effortlessly! But after the wax are gone, there are still marks of numbers on the window, which I tried to scrub off manually with some paper towels. According to the instruction on Goo-Gone, I am supposed to use soaped, clear, white towels to wipe the surface after applying that chemical. But I only have white towels. At this time, I noticed that a woman had been looking at me for sometime in her car across from mine. Suddenly, she got out of her car, and shoved me a couple lemon-soap wet white towels (you know those smell good soap towels with lemon fragrance?), and said, “Here, use this!” I gave her a grateful look. Those towels were EXACTLY what I needed.
What are the odds that a car next to you just happened to have those lemon soaped towels?
Note: something good does come out of bad experiences. For example, due to the shock and fear of a downward spiral in my life, I started going back to a normal sleeping schedule and waking up early. Second, I discovered this magical thing call GOO-GONE — I am not afraid of adhesive stickers anymore! Because of this convenient substance and the wonderful razor, I also removed some old windshied sticker adhesive marks, which I had deemed impossible to remove for a long time.
