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Monday, 20 April 2009

  • We're 20

    "I'm happy with who I am. I like myself," he said smugly.
    "You're such a narcissist!" I jokingly said.
    He threw a how-can-you-say-that-about-me look. He wasn't angry though. It was more like an expression of surprise.
    "Oh come on, you love your self, don't you?" I retorted.
    "Whatever," he said, "you don't know what I've been through."

    I felt so bad immediately. Who am I to judge another person? We're 20. We've lived about 1/4 of our lives. We've been happy, but who can honestly say that they haven't yet felt bent, broken, pushed around, tested to extreme stress levels? So, I'm sorry I said that to him. I know vaguely he's been through dark times and survived, and I should be congratulating him. I'm happy he's happy with himself.

    Update: A senior died in a car accident. A very close friend of mine here at school is best friends with the person who passed away. My friend is devastated. She refuses to get out of her room or eat. I've been force-feeding her for two days now. Other than that, I just hold her and listen to her. That's all I do. I don't offer her advice; I don't promise her everything will be better. I'm just there for her.

    So, there are two things that have been on my mind. One is a reminder of annica. Doesn't it seem unreal to you? Don't you feel like you're invincible often times? Don't you think to yourself, "Oh, that couldn't really happen to me!"? But it does. Impermanence is real. Treasure what you have right now. Apologize to a person you feel like you have wronged but have been too arrogant to say you're sorry. Tell people you truly care for that you love them a lot. Try to be just a bit nicer to everyone, including strangers.

    The other thing I realized is how hard it is to help a friend who is coping with death of her loved one. You have to choose your words carefully. Don't say you understand what she feels, because you really won't know everything she and that person shared - every little memory that makes her want to cry. A lot of my friend's friends are trying to be nice by telling her their stories. She doesn't want to hear your stories. To her, her friend is unique and cannot be compared to other people.

    Finally, I'm just really worried, because my friend has attempted suicide before. Now, she is telling me that she feels like she's losing "it" again. You have no idea how scary those words sound. She says, "What's the point of living when you're just going to die like that (as her friend did)?" This is a lot of stress on me. I can't stand the thought of losing her, again.

Sunday, 05 April 2009

  • What will it take?

    Don't people ask this question when they want something specific and want to figure out how to get it/there?

    I don't know what I want, so this question seems to be useless. Why am I here in college? Why are my parents spending a lot of money for me to be here? I really don't know what I want. The normal process of working for a goal doesn't seem to work for me, because I don't have a goal. What am I studying for when I have no idea what I want my future to look like?

    It just seems like I'm trying to cast a wide net, trying to catch everything that gets entangled. What exactly does a college education prepare me for when I don't even know what I want? Why am I laboring hours and hours of work in front of incomprehensible textbooks, trying to make sense of formulas that work only in theory? I am fighting, but isn't it foolish because I don't know what I'm fighting for?

    Right now, I'm very tempted to take a semester/a year off just to figure out what I want. I am aware that taking off a year wouldn't necessarily find me a goal, but school sometimes seems nothing more than an institution to me.

Tuesday, 03 March 2009

Sunday, 16 November 2008

  • "Eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases"...

    I've been meaning to write about Michael Pollan's visit to Oberlin since a month ago but haven't gotten around to doing it. I regret writing this late, because I've forgotten a lot of interesting things he said. Finney Chapel was jam-packed for his talk. I know Mtk has been talking about food, but I didn't really pay attention/understand what was going on before Pollan's talk. He basically talked about the era of cheap food being over and what policies we can pursue for the future. Here are some of the very few things I remember him saying:

    - we need to incorporate into the school curriculum classes on how to "eat" : it seems like these days people no longer know how to balance their diets and eat healthily

    - have local sustainable farming : and no, we're not talking about going back to the farming practices in our great grandfathers' time. we have newer, better and more sustainable technology that we just need to bring to smaller and more local farms. on that same note, America needs more farmers and to shift away from large expanses of land of monoculture.

    - in 1940, we needed only 1 calorie of energy of 2.3 calories of food energy, whereas today we need 10 calories of energy to produce 1 calorie of supermarket food energy. (wth??..)



    Why should we care about food? Basically it ties in with many issues on countries' political plates: environmental impacts of farming (e.g. pesticides, CO2 emissions), health issues (e.g. diabetes), energy crises (need for fossil fuels), national security (think about food riots and how a fragile food supply system is so vulnerable to terrorist attacks)

    it was a shame that i had 2 hours of sleep the night before and missed a lot of things he said... but here's a really interesting NY times article he wrote to the next president of the United States in October:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Tuesday, 21 October 2008

Pulse