yimster82's Xanga

The starting of a new year

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 06:31:01 GMT

Year 2000: graduated from high school

Year 2004: graduated from college

Year 2008: ???

2008 should be a significant year for me. Pressure is already mounting. I am set out to proof myself to a whole new audience. Will I fail or prevail? I don't know. But despite of the outcome, I know I will have to pump up my courage and face the new challenges ahead. Challenge yourself constantly--that's one good way to maintain the functioning of your brain.

I am going to explore new paths in life. It's a scary thing. I hate changes, but it's not like I prefer stability either since I tend to get bored when things start to become routines. Often times the "what-if"s that are in my mind make me hesitate to take the step forward, yet without the "what-if"s I probably wouldn't even think of the possibilities. Knowing when to let the "what-if"s get to me and when not is still something that I need to master.

Latin

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 06:02:29 GMT

As I've already mentioned in my previous blog entry, my latest interest has been studying Latin. Latin is basically a dead language in the modern society, but Latin terms or phrases can still be seen everywhere, especially in scientific literature.

I have always had interests in learning foreign languages, but Latin never came across my mind until this past summer. One day out of no reasons I did a search on amazon.com and found a cheap but popular Latin textbook that was being sold for less than $15. These were my thoughts at the time:

Wow, $15 for a textbook. Cheap!
Maybe I was stereotyping, but I thought the ability to read Latin = intelligence. Smart guys always seem to know Latin.
It might help improve my vocabulary since 60% of the English language is based on Latin.

Anyway, for a simple-minded person like me, these justifications were enough for me to commit the purchase. As usual, it took a few months for me to start reading it.

Indeed, Latin is not an easy language to learn. So far the grammar rules themselves are not too difficult to understand. It's just that there are many of them. Verbs need to be conjugated just like many other European languages (French, for example), but the things is, nouns and adjectives need to be changed to different forms as well! So once again the good old model of "practice makes perfect" is being applied. I do the exercises faithfully and am making good(?) progress. I am pretty sure that I will forget these grammar rules sooner or later, but as of the moment, I feel satisfied. :)

Holiday Season

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 06:00:26 GMT

Ahhh...the holiday season is finally here. I had a restful Thanksgiving break. Four days actually felt like a decent amount of time. It was like a mini vacation!

As usual, my family didn't celebrate Thanksgiving. We did have a special dinner though--my parents cooked one of my all time favorites (I forget/don't know what it's called in English). I only get to eat it once or twice every year in the winter (because no one else in the family is that fond of it), so it was good. :)

My sister and I went out for shopping on Black Friday. The malls were crowded. It was the first time I could remember that the malls were open at midnight. Anyway, I learned from long ago that it wasn't worth it to wake up before dawn and try to beat the crowd for free cookies or $5 coupons, so I just started my day around 9:30 am. We didn't find any "exceptional" deals, so we ended up not buying much. (Well, we did buy a $10 hand vacuum, which was a pretty decent deal.)

I spent most of the Thanksgiving break watching videos. No coding at all. It felt good to step away from my usual routines once in a while to do something different. I finally read the first chapter of my Wheelock's Latin textbook and made some sense out of it. 39 more chapters to go...

Best wishes

Thu, 08 Nov 2007 03:28:32 GMT

My grandma is sick. She has a tumor in her gallbladder and is in the hospital right now. Because she and the rest of my mom's family live in China, it's hard to tell how she is. Apparently my grandma has seen doctors and undergone numerous tests already, but no one told my mom and the rest of us until tonight. My dad actually spoke with my grandma couple days back, but she didn't say anything either. She just said she was fine. The one good news is that the tumor is benign, but the doctors wouldn't operate on my grandma because of her age. Sigh...whatever the outcome is, I just wish that my grandma would suffer the least amount. God bless.

So this is life

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 05:51:46 GMT

I don't like the life that I live right now. Why is it that things always come all at once? In the past few weeks, at least one thing happened unexpectedly each week, and almost every single one of those involved my parents. Dental appointments, medical appointments, radiology, naturalization, leaky toilet..., and yet to come, another round of dental and medical appointments, Social Security Administration, blah, blah, blah. Sometimes I feel like my parents, whether intentional or not, just make life tougher for me.

My parents complain a lot, and usually their complaints concern things that I don't think are that big of a deal, but they constantly remind me of those things during every moment that I spend with them until there is some sort of a resolution. It's both frustrating and depressing. Sometimes I feel bad for not spending more time with my parents, yet I don't want to be around them either if they are so negative all the time. I would appreciate it if they can just complain less and argue less.

I never like going to doctor's appointments--for myself or others, but most of the time I have to go and translate for my parents. I tend to get pretty stressful over those because I am afraid that the doctor might bring bad news. The one thing that I most dreaded to hear is, "We'll need to run some more tests to see if there really are problems." Why? Because I need to selectively translate to my parents, providing them with enough information to understand why they need to undergo more tests but not too much that would make them worry. Secrets are heavy burdens.

I really want to find someone/thing to blame, but all I can do now is complain in my little blog entry and torture my readers. Sorry...I will try to be a more cheerful person tomorrow.

Socializing can be relaxing...?

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 05:12:34 GMT

Yesterday the instructor of the Kumon center that I work at treated me and a few others out for dinner. The six of us basically just sat at Black Angus and hanged out for three hours. There weren't any deep and personal discussions but only chit-chats and gossips. And actually, I enjoyed it.

Lately there are things that have been bothering me, and I am constantly being reminded of those things everywhere I go. The dinner last night took the trouble thoughts off of my mind for a few hours, and I had a few laughs. I suppose socializing isn't always bad after all...

Fall and Winter are my favorite seasons. However, based on my past experience, things (and usually bad) tend to come up during the months (for me at least), and so, my mood is usually as gloomy as the weather...

New life. New hope.

Left-handedness - a possible theory?

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 03:52:21 GMT

A segment of this video talks about the "Vanishing Twin Syndrome", a phenomenon in which a fetus in a multi-gestation pregnancy dies in utero and is then partially or completely reabsorbed by the mother. This could have been caused by chromosomal abnormalities or lack of resources from the placenta (because there could be more than one fetus sharing the same placenta), and often times it goes unnoticed.

According to the video, scientists have estimated that up to 21% of fraternal twins (dizygotic) lose their sibling. And for identical twins who sharing the same placenta, the percentage could be up to 50%. The most startling claim it makes is that 1 out of every 8 people might have started life as a twin, but their sibling "vanishes" while still in the womb. Further, there could be clues that indicate which of us might have had a twin.

Occasionally, identical twins are born to be "mirror image twins". To put it simply, one of the twins might be right-handed while the other is left-handed (some cases are more extreme than this). Usually mirror image twins happen when a fertilized egg splits (into two cells to develop into identical twins) late (9 days after conception), when the egg has already decided its left and right side (I am not sure what this means, but that's how the video explains it).

Now, studies have shown that left-handedness occurs more frequently among twins than singletons. So if we connect the dots, one possible theory we can make is that some left-handed people may be the surviving sibling of a vanished twin. ...quite a theory, isn't it?

Giraffe - my favorite animal

Fri, 19 Oct 2007 04:12:32 GMT

If you have ever visited my actual Xanga site, you would notice that I have a picture of an animal as the background. Some people have asked if it were a larma, but actually, it's a giraffe.

In my junior year of high school, I took an art class during the summer. One of the projects was to create a clay model of an animal. Penguin was the first animal that came across my mind, but it seemed kind of lame and not special enough. My sister suggested a few other animals, including giraffe, and so, I decided that giraffe would be my animal. Now, giraffes have really really long necks. And I suppose with clay, the right way to do things is to start with a big piece of clay and then take bits of it away at a time rather than trying to get smaller pieces of clay to form one big thing. However, since I wasn't a clay master, I ended up doing the latter. The result? My clay giraffe had cracks on its legs and tail, and of course (and inevitably), its neck had a couple of cracks as well. I could barely hold it together (the head was falling down) before I got a grade for it. (The teacher was nice. I told him my giraffe was falling apart and he graded mine first.) So basically, it was a total disaster. Yet, it was this high school art project that got me into giraffes. Giraffes have beautiful eyelashes and cute little horns. Their anatomical structure is simply a living wonder. Very graceful animals. :)

He's a Woman, She's a Man

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 02:04:08 GMT

This is my favorite Chinese movie of all times, starring Anita Yuen and the late Leslie Cheung. It's a romantic comedy. The director cleverly mixed in bits of heterosexuality and homosexuality here and there to make the movie even more fun to watch. If you haven't watched it already, check it out sometimes and I am pretty sure that you will like it.

This is Leslie's most beloved song (it is also the only song I have ever sung alone in public):

BTW, Leslie really knew how to play the piano. He wasn't "acting".

Hard to explain why, but the word solitude came to mind when I saw this part of the movie:

I am becoming more and more like a nerd

Sat, 06 Oct 2007 05:44:31 GMT

Back when I was still in high school, everybody called me a nerd, and well, I looked like one. I wore glasses, carried a super-heavy backpack and held two thick textbooks in my arms, was always a loner...I thought I got out of being a nerd after I started going to college, but it seems like my old habit is coming back again. As I mentioned in my previous post, I prefer reading non-fiction and/or technical books these days, and I am somewhat obsessed in buying these kinds of books. For instance, I just ordered 4 books from Amazon and one of them is "Relativity: The Special and the General Theory" written by none other by Albert Einstein himself. One might ask why would I be interested in reading such book? And well, I don't know. I just think it would be "cool" to see how Einstein explains his own theories...lol