Oh, to be oneself amidst the throes of "originality"...

AAS 120

My friends Paul, Hayley, and Allison from my Intro to Asian American Pop Culture class all collaborated during lecture today to draw me this. It's really quite special--so many different pictures. I could just keep staring at it for hours which will serve me well come next lecture. Fifty minutes never seems so long. Thank goodness for iPhones (for satiating writing addictions and notating the professor's bombastic phrasing) and artsy friends.

RT #8: Things I could do instead of going to law school

1. State Department or CIA. Wow them with my awesome Spanish skills and promise to learn Arabic for them too. Also promise them that I can become a lawyer if and only if they pay for my education.

2. Flee to New York City and work at an unpaid internship for a publishing company while commuting from New Jersey and working nights at a strip club, er, restaurant.

3. Open a chewing gum museum in Singapore.

Notes on this Note

- I had to start numbering my "random thoughts" in my iPhone (they are now dated as well). Every time I edit them the phone changes the date of the note. Annoying! Thus, another method of cataloging them was necessary.

- I still want to go to law school. However, the chewing gum museum sounds mighty appealing. It would be a special place in Singapore for all those dissident gum-chewers whose oral fixations are simply unsanctioned. Also, I think the bank would really love this idea, maybe even more than the idea of me going to law school, as it would most likely cost less.

Ethereal Grit

RT: "Ethereal grit" was a phrase I used in class today to describe a poem. Who the hell do I think I am anyway?

And yes, iPhone, when I type the word "hell," I mean it. So you can stop auto-correcting it to "he'll." Sad to say, but I really am that gauche.

J'ai une question pour toi.

Is it better to be really good at one thing and not-so-good at another or to just be mediocre in both areas?

When obligatory nostalgia suddenly becomes voluntary...

RT: Five weeks until graduation, really? Today was a sunny day signaling spring's steady approach and appropriately marking the very beginning of the end.

I got an email today from the Chancellor about taking a "senior survey" so that the University could make improvements on its undergraduate programs. The end of the email made me super nostalgic:

I sincerely hope your years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have been happy and productive. I am certain that you will find they have provided you with a solid foundation upon which to build a career in business, education, government, and anything else you attempt. Enjoy your final weeks on campus, and please stay in touch with us after graduation.

The finality of it all is daunting. U of I has been my coach and confidant for the last four years, and now it's time to proceed to the next level. It's like attending college was this yearly game I played where I scored points in the form of letter grades, and "real life" wouldn't even enter the picture until round five.

I'm ready for round five. I guess I just didn't think it would arrive so soon, unexpectedly, on a sunny day during the onset of spring.

iPhone Notes

I love the "Notes" feature on iPhone.

I find myself writing down all my tonterías in it. Tonterías, in this case, are those thoughts that you don't deem worthy of paper (because they're really just that stupid or because you don't want a physical record of them), but that, for some reason, you can't seem to let float away from your brain. This is how the "Notes" feature on my iPhone serves me. So thank you, Apple makers, for fostering my writing addiction and thereby contributing to my (in)sanity.

Like I've said, my iPhone notes are not Shakespeare quality, especially since the best ones are usually crafted on four hours of sleep and a pot of coffee whilst I'm suffering from a migraine during my ridiculous Asian American Pop Culture class. Though, every now and then I stumble on a strand of truth, a piece of writing that when I look at again later, I don't hate. Isn't it crazy when that happens?

Here's one of them. (RT stands for "random thought." I label my notes that way for my own reference, you know, since there simply wouldn't be any other way to differentiate the whimsical musings of my consciousness from the mundane constituents of a mid-week grocery list: cereal, beer, water [iff: on sale] )

RT: Cooking always makes me feel better, even when I don't want to do it. Simple tasks like boiling noodles and adding garlic, and onion, and tomato--it's just a nice thing that I can do for myself.

And now I sound like one of those blog writers that lives on the Internet (you know, the ones that have virtual puppies shitting out virtual poop and whose "housework" entails organizing their "closets" of photographs by date and time.) It's hard to always be documenting your life so that you can showcase it on the Internet. It's like a disease: "User 'fairyboots' suffers from 'commodifaction of existence.' " Articulating it this way makes it so unappealing, right? It's like living life with the purpose of finding material for a blog. Eh, no thanks. Though I suppose that if a blog is what gives you inspiration, maybe it's okay. We all need something like that. Still, viewing life through a camera lens seems to prevent one from really living it.