Just a Saturday in November

I haven’t updated this blog in too long! I really did have a lot I wanted to say here and there throughout the summer and during the beginning of my senior year, but every time I wanted to write, a voice in the back of my mind told me that this was a way of procrastinating when I had other, more important things to do. After September 26th when I took the LSAT, however, I have had fewer excuses not to write. And so I am back from my blogging hiatus.

Ideally, I’d like people to read my blog and learn about my experiences, but more than anything, I’m blogging for myself. As someone who kept a diary surprisingly consistently for 8 years while growing up, I have missed writing down my thoughts for my future self and saving the memories I am making forever. From now on, even if I don’t have much time to write a lot, I will at least write a short update about what is happening in my life. One thing I have come to realize is that writing something impressive is not nearly as important as writing something at all. If I hold onto my thoughts for too long, more often than not I forget many things that would have been worth jotting down, however briefly.

So what’s happened since this summer?

I started my senior year of college. I got the stomach flu the Tuesday before the Saturday LSAT and ended up in the ER of the local hospital on Thursday. Although I was weak and worn, I decided to take the LSAT anyway. As I had expected, the logic games section was my hardest section, but overall, I felt about as good as I did on the practice tests. Interestingly, what I had dreaded materialized when I turned to the first page of the test and it was the logic games, but that section turned out to be fairly easy compared to the practice ones, and it boosted my confidence about the rest of the test instead of dampening it. When I got to the second logic games section, I realized that the first one had to have been the experimental section, but at least I got a little more practice on the LG before doing that section because of the experimental section.

I received a 171 on the LSAT. I was aiming for a 172, but because I was sick, a 171 is acceptable. I can only wonder what my score would have been if I hadn’t been sick, since I didn’t study during the last 3 days before the test.

I submitted all of my law school applications between October 25th and October 28th. I was extremely happy to finally be done with that part of my life. On November 4th, I received an acceptance email from Duke Law, so at least I know for a fact now that I’m going to law schoo! Woohoo!

Since receiving my acceptance, I have definitely let myself procrastinate on my work more than I have in past years. Friends still insist that I work abnormally hard, but I really wouldn’t say so. Last night, I went rock climbing, played ultimate frisbee, and got free food from my school’s “Battle of the Late Night Foods.” Today, I spent two hours getting dinner with my suitemates from sophomore year, and then spent another hour watching Cinderella II and III (don’t ask, I stumbled upon them on youtube). By the looks of it, I probably won’t get anything done tonight either.

One constant source of procrastination through my college years has been online shopping or window shopping. In fact, I have started putting together an Anthropologie Christmas wishlist. I adore several of their current online items, but I’m also very aware that Anthro is getting pricier every year. I remember days when many blouses could be found for $68, but now most of the blouses are hovering around the $98 to $118 range. Some of this increase may be attributed to inflation or changes in the fabric used in the winter collection, but the prices are beginning to move entirely out of what I can afford! And yet, many of their items are so temptingly and deliciously covetable. I practically drooled over the following items:

Angora Anthropologie skirt with nylon lining.

Isn’t this skirt gorgeous? Not only does it evoke the grace and elegance of a sophisticate with its painted and appliqued floral design and slate-blue background, it is also warm for the winter, and the reviews indicate that it is of high quality.

A cozy, shapely, one-of-a-kind sweater.

This sweater looks perfect for chilly nights, with or without an overcoat. The tapered sleeves are fitted at the forearm to keep cold air out, while the eye-catching floral design adds greater appeal to the already shapely cut. The wooden buttons and wide collar are also cute details that make this sweater unique.

A delicate, feminine top to wear under a cardigan.

This top epitomizes understated elegance with its feminine, soft, pink hue and lovely draping. This would look great with dangling crystal earrings with gold studs, a soft gray cardigan, and wide-leg trousers or jeans.

This piece juxtaposes several neutral, earthy tones in order to confer upon its wearer an unassuming aura of peace, oneness with nature, and dignity–all while keeping her warm and cozy. Not only is it attractive, this cardigan is also versatile. It can be worn with jeans and flats, or with a skirt and tights in the fall, winter, or early spring.

The above are just a few of the many pieces (13) that I have added to my wishlist. They’re all pricey, but I feel like I deserve a little reward for finishing my Fulbright and law school applications and getting into Duke. I honestly haven’t celebrated any of these accomplishments properly. I’m finding myself to be a bit of a homebody, going out very few times this semester, but what can I say–I’m not a drinker and it’s too cold to venture willingly outside after hours. My idea of a relaxing night is having a deep, personal conversation catching up with a friend one-on-one, relaxing with half a glass of wine, and reading a captivating novel in bed until I feel my lids becoming heavy. Perhaps this makes me lame. Perhaps this makes me too old for my age. But, that’s just who I am.

What else should I quickly get into this entry before going to bed? The freshman are looking younger than ever before. I’ve been told that I couldn’t pass for 18 (oh no, am I looking old already?!), and I have been dreaming more than ever of my future in law school. As much as I can’t wait for law school, one of the things I’m looking forward to the most is living in the same house/apartment for three years. As a homebody, I enjoy being able to fully unpack and decorate my living area. However, since I have been moving to a different location on campus every year as a undergraduate, I haven’t fulfilled my need to nest. Although it might be a bit premature to say all of this will happen, I can’t wait to live with my bf, make the new apartment truly homey, and adopt kittens after this year!

That’s one thing I’ve been realizing about myself, over and over–no matter what’s happening at present, I’m always looking forward to the future. This has been true almost as far back as I can remember. In middle school, it was remaking myself at my new school in CT and developing physically (I was always the shortest, skinniest kid in my grade until 6th grade). In high school, I was looking forward to getting my driver’s license, making my own money, and going off to college. In college, it was getting to know all these new people, taking exciting classes, and studying abroad. Now, it’s going to law school and the things I mentioned before. And I’m already looking forward to having my own house and raising beautiful children 5-10 years into the future. I’ve even started a word document for things to remember when raising my kids.

Pretty much, my outlook on life in the past 10 years has been that life keeps getting better and better. I like that about myself. Let’s hope this continues.

From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream Waters

I can’t believe it’s already been two months since my last entry, which was written in China! Time definitely flies by when you’re busy, and lately I have been. Of course, this is no excuse for not continuing my writing.

I decided early on to devote this summer to applying to law schools and preparing for the LSAT. I realized that during the last two summers, my internships made it very hard for me to look at the LSAT, since I would mentally excuse myself from looking at my books because I was tired after a day of work. And there was the fact that my high school friends weren’t far from where I was living, so the desire to spend time hanging out with them usually outweighed my motivation to concentrate on more work.

This summer has mostly been a lonely one, since I’m living at my parents’ house, away from where I went to high school. It’s the first time I’ve stayed more than a couple of weeks at home since high school. During the last two summers, I was in Connecticut for internships, and during winter breaks, I shuffled between CT and NJ. Luckily, I’ve stayed in touch over the years with a best friend who I went to elementary school with here in NJ, so I called her up a couple of weeks ago, and we hung out. It was nice catching up and seeing how little things have changed. But since she’s living with her boyfriend at Rutgers, taking classes there, and has her own summer travel plans, I can’t expect to see her more than a few times. My boyfriend is also away in California working at his new full-time job at a national lab. I flew out in July to see him, and while we had a great time, I also find it hard to push the thought of us always being apart out of my mind.

Taken at the beach at Santa Cruz

Although my parents are around, I haven’t actually had any conversations at length with them. At least we haven’t gotten into big arguments the way we would back when I was in high school. Back then, it seemed like the bickering would never end. Since college, it’s been a lot more peaceful between us, but it’s also sad that this harmony is coming after my childhood, when it would’ve meant so much more to my development and happiness while I was growing up. Besides bland conversations over dinner about law schools and their work lives, we haven’t talked about much.

I have talked to my brother, K., quite a lot more this summer than I have in the past two years. And while two years seems like such a short time to me now, I realize that at his age (15 years), two years means a world of difference. He has grown up so much during my absences at school already, and one reason I don’t feel as bad about being stuck at home this summer is that now I can see him before he grows up entirely. He’s about 5’ 7” now and since he only started getting growth spurts last year, I’m guessing he’ll be at least 5’10 before he stops growing. This might not seem like news to anyone, but in our short, Asian household, it means we’ll have someone “tall.” It seems silly to be obsessing over my brother’s height, but thinking about K. has always brought out my maternal instincts. With our six-year age gap, I’ve always felt protective and nurturing towards him. Often times when I disagreed with my parents’ authoritarian attitude and lack of effort in communicating with me for reasons other than school, I mentally noted the things I resented and promised myself to give K. more than what I got.

Besides SAT verbal prep classes earlier this summer and marching band practice coming up in mid-August, K. has spent his time with me at home. Of course, I remind him to do all the things (i.e. summer reading, AP chemistry prep, physics SAT II prep, and clarinet) that my parents made him write down in a schedule, and I do get mad and discipline him when I’m pretty sure he’s been playing games online for hours instead of working, but I try to maintain a balanced approach to being a good older sister. It’s complicated. On the one hand, I want to “parent” him because I want to see him grow up well, but on the other hand, I really want to be a sister to him, not a mom. I don’t want him to be constantly stressed out or even scared when talking to me the way I was talking to my parents while growing up. I want him to think he can share things with me he wouldn’t with my parents. I want to be a role model for him, to tell him how I got to where I am, and to be there for him.

Over lunch, I’ve tried casually starting conversations about how school life is or asking him about his friends in the neighborhood. It seems so natural for siblings in other households to talk to each other normally, but when you grow up in a household where the parents don’t lead normal conversations with the expectation that everyone will participate, but rather address each child separately, you end up feeling awkward and unfamiliar with what to say when the parents are out of the picture. It’s even more awkward now that K. is a teenager and is capable of sharing his personal life on a much more equal level to me, since when he was little he’d just talk about whatever small topics were currently distracting him. I used to be able to address him like he was a little kid, but now, just two years later, he deserves more respect and can’t be talked to that way anymore. I also realize that as we get older and older, the less and less the age gap will matter.

I took K. out to Friendly’s the other day, since we got some coupons in the mail, and enjoyed a nice lunch together. We made fun of the bad service, since the waitress really didn’t seem to want to be there, and made small talk. I tried to get him to tell me who he had a crush on, but he got embarrassed and just asked why I wanted to know. Even though it must’ve been awkward for him, I think I made progress, just by letting him realize that A) I’m interested in the goings-on in his life and B) That I’m not going to be mad at him for sharing. Perhaps he’ll tell me by the end of the summer!

Even if I don’t significantly raise my LSAT score through the Powerscore course I’m taking in Manhattan, at least I will have bonded with my brother. The LSAT really is getting on my nerves, though. My score has pretty much barely changed (always +/- 1 point) on the practice tests, even though I feel like I’m learning a lot through the course and homework materials. I know my biggest problem is the Logic Games. I haven’t gotten to answer questions on the fourth game during the last three practice tests I’ve taken, much less finish the section. It bothers me a lot because I know that given just 5-10 more minutes, I could essentially get all the questions in that section correct. It’s disheartening because even though I’m doing many, many practice games, I can’t seem to get my speed down to 9 minutes a game. Given that I’m doing much better on the other sections of the LSAT, doing poorly on the logic games makes me feel even dumber. It’s as if I’ve always been hiding a secret deficiency because up till now, nothing brought my disability to light. Now, LSAT preparations are shining a light on this gross deformity, this atrophied muscle that had never been exposed. Please excuse the political incorrectness of this statement, but it’s like I now realize that I’ve been a high-functioning retard the entire time. I seriously hope that over the next month, I can overcome this and that if I don’t do well on the LSAT, at least it’s not because I couldn’t finish.

In other news, I’ve been reading Anarchy and Elegance, Confessions of a Journalist at Yale Law School by Christ Goodrich. It’s about a journalist who did a one-year M.S.L. degree at Yale to supplement his journalism training. It’s interesting because he writes about Yale Law School from an insider’s perspective, but at the same time, he maintains some distance between himself and the institution because he doesn’t aspire to become a lawyer and he’s only there for the one year. However, the book probably isn’t very good for my morale given that I’m applying to law school. Goodrich appears committed to the conclusion that law school makes you lose your humanity, your soul. He criticizes the cold, meticulous way in which law imposes a set of rules that are to be applied whenever certain facts exist, with the human face of the players involved in the case removed from consideration. He is disgusted by the way in which Supreme Court cases are often decided because the justices just want to clarify a view of theirs or because they don’t want to allow a certain case to imply the legality of an action in future cases, which Goodrich views as the case turning on mere technicality, rather than on the implications for the lives of the people in the case. He also doesn’t like the fact that law generally doesn’t allow for uncertainty or exceptions; juries are never told to decide whether a defendant is “probably guilty,” even though the reality is often that there is no certainty.

I think I’ll read Anarchy and Elegance to the end, just because it’s readable and relevant, and I don’t like stopping books in the middle, but I hope that Goodrich leaves some room for me to believe that lawyers aren’t all evil and heartless. I often find myself looking for sentences that show the weakness of his reasoning or overgeneralizations he makes so I can mentally attack his credibility. This works to an extent actually, since I think he does over-exaggerate (his journalism background coming through?) and he says that he never wanted to be a lawyer in the first place. He even says in the beginning that he had a long-standing joking with a friend that the friend should shoot him if he ever became a lawyer.

Between the book, visiting the boyfriend again, LSAT stuff, law school apps, nine cycles of America’s Next Top Model, and bonding with the brother, I have a lot of things to do in the remaining month I have left before senior year begins.

Lenovo X61 Tablet Finally Arrived

So my long-awaited X61 tablet finally arrived on the 5th; I ordered it during a Black Friday sale during the Thanksgiving long weekend. At first I had it sent to my school address under the apparently mistaken presumption that it would actually take 5 to 7 business days to ship. I figured that I’d get it around the time finals were over and would have time to play with it while waiting for the bf to finish up his finals. When it still wasn’t in my hands during finals week two weeks later, I realized I should probably try to reroute the shipping to my permanent address in case it didn’t arrive until I left.

It did not seem like such a complicated task, but it turned out to be one. Apparently with Lenovo, and disclaimer: I don’t want to poo poo a single company when others may do the same, you can’t change the shipping address once an order is made. You can’t reroute the shipping either until the item is actually shipped, which is just inane, seeing as how allowing the item to ship directly to the new destination rather than change destinations mid-ship would probably save the company itself a bunch of money.

Furthermore, you can’t get any tax money refunded either, even if the tax rate is lower in the state of your new destination, as it was in my case. I got kind of irritated on this second issue with the clearly foreign customer rep who was on the line when I called them the second time, not willing to give up after the unsuccessful first. I asked for clarification rhetorically, “So you’re telling me that even though I’m getting this item nearly a month after I ordered it and as a result of this inordinate delay I have to ship it elsewhere, I can’t get any tax money back for shipping it to the new location?” The customer rep said he was “Sorry ma’am, but this is our policy.”

The laptop finally shipped on Christmas eve,  when I got an email notification of shipment. I tried to call right away to get the package rerouted then, but as I suspected, Lenovo wasn’t taking calls that day. All I could do was anxiously track my package through the UPS website. It turned out the next day that the package was stalled because of Christmas and would be set to reship on the 29th. My calls finally got through the next day, at which time I was told my rerouting request would take two days to process. Finally, I saw online that the package had arrived at my school address–the wrong address, now that I was home–with one failed attempt at delivery. It was only then that my rerouting request went through. The package finally started heading the right way–the right way now being my boyfriend’s parents house, now that that was where I planned to spend New Year’s. The rest is history.

The lesson of this rant is that if you value the timely delivery of your laptop, don’t order it from Lenovo. That said, I realize that ordering it right before the holidays was a big factor in the delays, but what could I do? Black Friday was when they were having the special sale!

So I finally have it. Thank goodness (I’m trying to get out of the habit of saying “Thank God” when I’m nonreligious and proud of it) for the bf, because having him around makes setting up new computers a million times breezier. As an engineer who does this kind of thing for fun anyway, he eagerly helped delete all of the unnecessary trial versions of different antivirus protections and installed Microsoft Office 2007 seamlessly. He also showed me how to use OneNote, which I had never used before, in order to make taking notes easier.

I got the tablet in the first place because I thought it would make notetaking easier. I was tired of rummaging through my stack of notebooks looking for the right ones through my color-coding system and looking for a functional pen whenever I got ready for class, all while watching the bf slickly slip his X41 tablet into his backpack, all set for stylish notetaking. I think this issue, the fact that my old Inspiron is going on 5 years, and the Black Friday sale all justified the investment, even though a regular notebook would have been much more economical.

Thus far, my friends and family seem to enjoy playing with the tablet immensely. It’s amusing how if you give a person a piece of lined paper and a pen, it’s of absolutely no interest to him, but if you give him the same thing, but on a screen, it becomes amazing and provides endless entertainment because you can “write on it!” with “so many different pens and markers to choose from!”

There’s still much to learn about the tablet, for example, how to convert written text into type for an entire document (right now I only know how to do it line by line), and maybe I’ll even write a blog entry using the stylus, but just having it is pretty exciting for now, and I think it’ll be extremely useful during the coming semester in Shanghai. I wonder whether using laptops to take notes in China is as common among the college set as it is in the U.S. I wonder whether Chinese students use tablets at all and whether I’ll be seen as Chinese around campus, or as a foreign, yet Chinese, oddity. This latter question only touches the tip of the iceberg in terms of thoughts I’ve had about my upcoming travels to the Far East, but unfortunately I think I’ll have to wait and devote several blog entries entirely to that subject.

Affectionately,

Dorothy