Cette entrée est seulement pour ennuyer l'une de mes amies. Bonne traduction !

Je réfléchis de mes rapports avec mes « majeurs » : si la chimie était un mec et je sortais avec lui, tous les gens me diraient qu’on devrait se casser, parce qu’elle ressemble une relation toxique. Quelquefois je suis piquée par quelque chose d’intéressant, mais ça ne dure qu’une période de classe ; la plupart des trucs que j’apprends dans cette matière inspirent soit l’ennui, soit l’aversion évidente. C’est bizarre que seulement dans le monde intellectuel, académique, il y a une opinion positive d’endurer « puisque t’es déjà arrivée si loin », malgré l’énorme désastre qu’une seule décision est provoquée et le misère qu’elle inflige.

( in French 3 )

Well, at least these days I can actually kinda hold a simple conversation in French. And whine about why I think the subjunctive is ridiculously inconsistent.

In other news, applying for PSMP soon; nervous. Can't believe it's been almost two years.

A little premature to be saying that, but say it I will.

I haven't written here for an extremely long time.

Guess I just felt the sudden desire to write an entry here... a little corner of the vast Internet that I've claimed for years on end. I may have temporarily shifted myself, but I don't think I'll ever relinquish all control.

It is interesting how my online presence correlates to my real life movements – a dorm is but an abode on loan, but an apartment is very different... and I am living here, away from home, where I have lived all my life.

I am tired.

They say it's not summer that kills you; it's the fall semester afterwards. I don't quite agree with that.

When I decided not to return home this winter I was perfectly fine with the idea. But two semesters change a person. I am not homesick, nor do I feel an overwhelming desire to fly for 19 hours on a cramped plane, but I am restless. I need to move around. I need to go somewhere. I need to get out of the Bay Area for just a few weeks.

Thankfully, I will get to do that over Winter Break.

My thoughts are very jumbled up.

This semester, though not over, has been very enlightening. I think I can safely say that I've pushed myself further than I've ever before. Intellectually, academically, socially... I've made a lot of new friends in my newly-declared major, which, as everyone knows, is stealing my heart. I like almost everything that I currently study. At least, I don't have any strong objections against it, which is more than I can say for certain other classes.

Last semester (Spring, not Summer), there was physics.

And the semester before that – I was merely adjusting. I was not pushing myself at all.

This semester I am pushing myself... especially so in my studies. The social outcomes are a side effect of that. I love my linguistics major friends. We're a nice little group, with our in-jokes and nerdiness and biweekly Friday dinners. I wonder where we're eating next Friday after Thanksgiving.

I am not pushing myself in other areas though. I am not very surprised. I exercise my brain a lot, but not much else. It's unhealthy, but hey, this is what college students do.

I will really miss this semester.

The profs, the GSIs, the friends, the workload. All the events that have shaken up Berkeley, literally (earthquakes) and figuratively (protests). I love it all so much. It has been a great high, but it is beginning to wind down. And finals loom.

I'd say this semester rates very highly on my scale of memorable semesters. Perhaps it is #2. I don't think the period of time currently occupying #1 will be overtaken for a very long time. If you were involved in it, you know what I'm talking about. This space, chronicling much of my time of being aware, might provide some clues.

(Oh, and my driving test is in two weeks' time. I shall pass. Gandalf, I banish you to Berkeley hippie-land; you will not invade El Cerrito.)

I feel sort of old today. This past month, I've been doing many "grown-up" things I've never done before. While I guess this is a good preparation for True Adult Life (minus the stress of actually working), it still feels a little strange and surreal.

So, this semester:

1. I went on a couple of holidays with friends, multi-city trips and road-trips and more, all without my parents' help. We paid for everything ourselves, we found cheap rooms, we navigated through the subways and metros (I now know the train systems in Toronto, New York and DC very well), we figured out how the Amtrak worked, and we flew places.

I'd always known that planning a holiday could be an exercise in frustration, just by watching my parents, but it's different when you do it yourself. Little by little you realize that you aren't as incompetent as you thought. And the thrill of actually pulling it off and actually having a good time is totally worth the effort.

2. I have an apartment, as mentioned in my last entry. Just a few minutes ago I wrote my first check to pay my half of the rent. I wrote a check. Like, one of those legit ones that a stranger will cash in so that I don't get kicked out of my apartment. My apartment! We scouted for it on Craigslist, called, viewed a couple of places, applied for one, signed the contract, furnished the place, set up internet and gas and electricity, and started paying the bills. Bills.

It's not like I didn't pay any bills throughout the year. I mean, there was the phone bill, and the housing bill. But the dorms are basically handed to you on a platter, and you don't really have to maintain it, and an extra phone bill is nothing. Checking your spending with all these variable costs rather than one fixed amount from the university and phone company is quite new.

---

Put together, it's an interesting experience, especially if you take into account that all that planning for an apartment and the trips took place among the swaying ship that is schoolwork. I don't think I'll ever have a semester like this again – or maybe I will, when transitioning between the end of my BS/BA and grad school. It's too early to tell. Meanwhile, I need to wipe the floor to get rid of the dust that accumulated in my two-week absence. Ah, apartment life.

Been ages since I wrote anything here. My (very reasonable) excuse is that all my creative-brain-writing juices have been poured into thrice-weekly journals from S,SEASN R5B throughout the entire semester. Now that Sp11 is over, I feel obliged to update people on my life. Also, I'm actually finding it difficult to adjust to not having a default outlet to vomit my thoughts into. The S,SEASN R5B journal contents were mostly unfiltered: whatever I could come up with. This LJ, however, is quite a different story.

Speaking of school, let's commemorate the end of my 4.0, which sadly only lasted one semester. Like as if that wasn't expected in the first place. With me having to take physics for my chem major, it was only a matter of time until the inevitable stain of a B crept into my Berkeley transcript. In this case, I should thank Physics 7A.

Though I'm not quite as bitter about that. I knew, quite certainly, from the start, that Physics 7A (and 7B) were going to be two hellholes of a disaster. Physics and I are like oil and water. And trust me, I've tried a lot of different kinds of soaps, and none have worked. On the other hand, I'm extremely disappointed for Linguistics 100, which was supposed to be an A but didn't materialize. I did know about this problem – for some reason I kept scoring in A- territory no matter how much I tried not to make silly mistakes. The final was... horrendous. Thrice the difficulty of the previous midterms, or something like that. I suppose that while I was very clearly above the mean/median, as I had been throughout the semester, I was still not in the top 5% or whatever it is that the professor set A to be, as I had been throughout the semester. I'm kind of frustrated because I was really hoping for a 4.0 in the linguistics major, but alas, that is not to be.

In any case, S,SEASN R5B gave me my first A+, which was kind of unexpected (at the start of the semester at least), though by the end I was averaging 99%, so when the grade came I wasn't too shocked. It was also the first time I got 100% on any essay. To say I'm stunned by the grading system here, even after a semester, is an understatement. I mean, who on earth gets 100% for an essay? Especially for one that I took all of three hours to finish? But I won't complain.

Anyway, the few days after finals was something I term "Moving Weekend", in which I carted everything from my dorm room on southside to my apartment on northside. Up a freaking hill. I hate moving. Thankfully there were Strong Boys (and Men) to help me shift my stuff up the three floors of stairs in my non-elevator apartment. I got my bedframe and mattress from a senior for cheap, which was nice. IKEA supplied my desk and chair and bedsheets and drawers. The best part was the everything-else that this guy sold us. He was an exchange PhD student from Italy who'd been in California for only three months, and was getting rid of all the stuff in his apartment, which he said he'd rather see someone using than simply letting go. So for $200, we got: a large futon (opens to a double bed), a small futon (opens to a twin bed), a drying rack, a dining table and four chairs, a study desk, three small end tables, a couple of pots and pans, a toaster, a bunch of cutlery and cutlery organizers, some plates and bowls, two rugs, a few lamps, etc, etc. Two. Hundred. Dollars. Can you believe that? We really struck gold with this guy.

After we'd settled whatever was imminently necessary to live in the apartment, I left for LA with the Women's Chorale. Exams ended on Thursday, I moved and set everything up from Friday to Sunday, and Monday morning I was gone. We drove down to Santa Cruz before reaching LA proper, and sang on the beach a couple of times. The next day we went out to Hollywood and sang at Grauman's Chinese Theater, and tried flash-mobbing in the LA metro before going back to Universal Citywalk for dinner. Day three, we headed to Santa Monica pier, which is beautiful – it also has a great shopping district. Too bad we couldn't stay there longer. Next was Venice Beach, which is actually really ghetto. Someone described it as "hobos on Telegraph and People's Park being thrown on the beach and told to set up shop". It's actually a pretty apt description. The only thing not so ghetto about it was the obstacle course on the beach where they were filming the semifinals of Ninja Warrior, which was nice to watch, if only to see the rugged guys fail spectacularly. Out of the ten or so guys we watched, only one made it through the entire course. To be fair, the course was impossibly difficult – I would fall in the first obstacle, I bet.

That night I left the chorale and flew to Toronto, getting delayed and missing my connection in Chicago on the way. That... really sucked. But after getting very little sleep, I reached Toronto and met Rachel, whose baggage was on my flight anyway, so it was all fine. We spent two days in Toronto. The first day, we went to the Bata Shoe Museum, and it was pay-as-you-want night, which was awesome because we didn't have to pay the full $14 fee. The museum was quite fun to look at – it covered shoes of every culture, not just modern Western fashion. Then we walked through the University of Toronto, which looks like an interesting mashup between public university and traditional college quadrangle cloisters. The second day was a visit to Lake Ontario, where it rained for a little bit, which was kinda depressing. But it lifted and once we were done with the island, we went back to Kensington Market and had dinner. We stayed in a small guesthouse that we'd found on roomorama, only to be told that they had their own website and so we could've saved on the roomorama fee, but ah well. It was still pretty cheap though, and the room was big and clean. The bed was amazingly comfortable pocket coil. The house itself was located in this historic part of town called "Cabbagetown". I am not even kidding. It was a 15-min walk away from downtown Yonge Street, which was okay by us.

Which brings us to today. Our train left at 8.20 am, so we got up early and dragged ourselves to Union Station to board the Amtrak. The scenery was quaint, small-town Canadian, at least as much as I saw before drifting off to sleep. When I woke up we were at customs and immigration, which took forever as they unloaded the train car by car. Once we'd finally cleared everything, the Amtrak people dropped us off and we got picked up by the owners of the motel we're staying at. This motel is also quite cheap and nice, especially since the owners practically drive you to everywhere interesting. We headed to Niagara Falls State Park and spent the entire afternoon and evening there, going to Cave of the Winds, Maid of the Mist, Niagara Aquarium, Three Sisters Island, and more. I can't stress the beauty and power of the Falls. To think so much water falls down at once... well, pictures are on facebook if you'd like to see. We got wet a couple of times, but it was fun, and we dried quickly. My camera got a lot of exercise. We splurged a little on dinner at Hard Rock Café, which was very nice, before coming back to the room.

Now it's 1 in the morning and we have to be up at 5.30 tomorrow since our Amtrak train leaves at 7. But it'll be a nine-hour ride. Next up: the bright lights of New York City!

Listen to this (it skips straight to the song of interest):

“The composition is for choir and is gentle, delicate and meditative. The ancient, sixth century plainchant of Ubi Caritas is blended with 21st century harmony to create a work that, I hope, is both new and reflective of the past.”

This new arrangement of Ubi Caritas was commissioned by Prince William for his wedding. You can read more about composer Paul Mealor's thoughts on the piece here.

I, personally, have been looping this song endlessly over the past few days.

I was browsing through my 2005 entries and I found this, which I thought was rather amusing. I decided to redo it. So, Vanessa from 2005 vs Vanessa from 2011 (almost exactly six years, actually). Present-day me in italics.

( Read more... )

Post-midnight thoughts:



I had the privilege of being at this concert, and I remember this moment so well. It was amazing, magical, indescribable. This song was the end of a long, delightful set list that traversed the funny to the pensive to the anthemic. And what a fitting end it was – one of her oldest songs still regularly played because it's so popular (by "old", I mean written around 2002-2003; by "regularly played", I mean every single show). When she leaned away from the microphone and invited everyone to join in, my breath was taken away for just a split second. I don't know how to put my feelings into words – it was such a touching song, her signature song, and she was sharing it with us, creating a collective experience. It wasn't just her performing the song and finishing well. We all participated; we all joined in for the huge finale and forged an incredible closure to a concert that had been equally about audience engagement as it had been about watching a gifted performer. We told the story together.

I do realize that this sounds extremely syrupy, but believe me, the charge in the air was there that night. We'd covered lots of land with all the different songs and were appropriately satiated, and this was the perfect denouement (before the optimistic, forward-looking encore, of course). I don't know when she'll play in San Francisco again. But until then, I'll loop the live recordings and savour the memories, letting them push me through life's tangled moments.

Once in a while I suffer from a massive drop in self-esteem.

I was reading a senior's blog today, and my first reaction was: I want to be like that. I want to have a crazy passion that consumes me, that colours my life and gives me goals to look forward to. I want to be great at something, just one thing, that would define who I am, rather than be a jack of all trades.

Well, maybe not all, because that's not true. But I'm good at some things, just not great at them. Therein lies the problem:

I'm good at writing, and I can churn out an A paper if I put effort into it, but I'm not great at it.
I'm good at music, compared to most people, but I'm not a great pianist or flautist or composer.
I'm good at chemistry, but I just don't have the ingenuity that a great scientist has.

...et cetera, et cetera.

I think a large part of the reason why I'm never really great at something is because I never fully devote my time to one particular thing. I really admire people who put hours into their craft, nothing but their craft. There's the saying that 10,000 hours is the threshold to become great at something, and I don't think I'm near that in anything that I do. I'm too lazy, and I give up too easily – I don't persevere through the difficult stretch that always comes, no matter how much natural aptitude I have for what I'm doing.

And of course, nothing will change after this, because change is difficult, and I don't want to put in the effort to change.

Sometimes I have the fleeting hope that once I find something that I truly love, I will be able to pursue it despite all difficulties. And sometimes I tell myself, it's okay, I can wait for something like that to grab hold of my heart and pull me through.

But deep down I know this is untrue. There are some people in the world who are lucky enough to find their one calling early in life, but the great majority of successful people get to where they are by sheer, hard work. And I don't know if I'll ever get to that point.

I wonder what my future holds in store for me.