Life is a Boat

Rie Fu - Life is a Boat

Nobody knows who I really am
I never felt this empty before
And if I ever need someone to come along
Who's gonna comfort me, and keep me strong?

We all are rowing the boat of fate
The waves keep on coming and we can't escape
But if we ever get lost on our way
The waves would guide you through another day

(Japanese)
Far away, I'm breathing, as if I'm transparent
It would seem I'm in the dark, but I was only blindfolded
I give a prayer as I wait for the new day
Shining vividly up to the edge of that sea

Nobody knows who I really am
Maybe they just don't give a damn
But if I ever need someone to come along
I know you would follow me, and keep me strong

(Japanese)
People's hearts change and sneak away from them
The moon in its new cycle leads the boat again

And every time I see your face
The ocean heaves up to my heart
You make me want to strain against the oars
And soon I can see the shore

Oh, I can see the shore
When will I ever see the shore?

I want you to know who I really am
I never thought I'd feel this way towards you
And if you ever need someone to come along
I will follow you, and keep you strong

(Japanese)
And the journey continues on quiet days as well
The moon in its new cycle shines on the boat again
I give a prayer as I wait for the new day
Shining vividly up to the edge of the sea

And every time I see your face
The oceans heave up to my heart
And make me wanna strain at the oars
And soon I can see the shore

(Japanese)
We are all rowing a boat of fate
but the waves keep attacking us
But isn't this that still a wonderful journey?
They are all wonderful journeys

Translation found here. Sometimes certain songs just resonate, you know? I wish I could be beyond the 3rd stanza of this song, oh well. Anyway, I first heard this song as the ending theme to the anime, Bleach.

Here's a vid of it:

What Med Students Say

My friend, who I'm going to call Harry, and I have the most random convos on gchat - especially about med school and the way in which we complain about it. Here are some long-ish excerpts for your amusement (edited and punctuated to make it easier to read):

Harry: He [mutual friend] is able to focus, unlike me
Me: Hahaha, unlike us you mean
Harry: Ya, I'm just hoping I can bankai for it or something
Me: LOL, dude I haven't bankai'd in studying for so long
Harry: And sustain it
Me: I'm like, shikai-ing at best but then I'm hit with damn refractory periods that last up to 2 days
Harry: I felt like I bankai'd, went into hollow form, took off my eye patch, and went into 9-tails, and use amaretsu when studying for exams, at some point. Evidently, I've exhausted all of my Bleach and Naruto moves. Good thing I still have hyper beam up my sleeve.
Me: It's ok, I intend to get Aizen on the finals this semester
Harry: Also, remember in Bleach, whoever releases first loses. So, you better save that last release for the USMLE.
Me: Omg, you're right. Damn.
Harry: Or it's gonna pwn your ass.
Me: Ok, this is true, I'll save Aizen-mode for the USMLE.
Harry: Man, Aizen ain't even the strongest. The strongest is Ichigo screaming at the top of his lungs, at glass-shattering frequencies.

Harry: I don't particularly care so much, I'm a terrible doctor cuz if I don't know someone, it's hard for me to care about them.
Me: Awww.
Harry: So like, my doctor-patient relationship is strictly business.
Me: But you WILL get to know people . . .
Harry: So ya, hopefully whatever I do it won't be patient-interaction heavy.
Me: [My mentor] knew all his patients pretty damn well, and how things were like at home and such, and I'm like "wow . . . how do you keep all those people straight?"
Harry: Ya, I don't want to get that passionate about my job. As a doctor, you're supposed to be calm, cool and collected, and show passion.
Me: Kinda hard to be calm, cool, and collected, AND show passion, lol.
Harry: Ya
Me: Passion kinda negates those first 3 sometimes. Caring, sure. But caring =/= passion.
Harry: Basically asking to be a superhuman.
Me: I KNOW.
Harry: Which I'm not good at.
Me: I'm not either. I can be one or the other, but not both simultaneously.
Harry: I'd have to take like, acting classes for 2 more years if I wanted to get good at that.
Me: LOL. Alas, such is our life.

Me: God I don't wanna study.
Harry: I never want to study, lol.
Me: I spent all day trying to pump myself up to do so too.
Harry: All day yesterday, haha, building up that activation energy only not to reach past the threshold.
Me: Haha, yeah.
. . .
Harry: Neuroscience is the beast, lol, beast of all beasts.
Me: How so?
Harry: So many lectures, where 1 = 1.5 lectures.
Me: Hahaha, yeah . . . and then there's phys, the mother of beasts.
Harry: That's ok for now, it hasn't released itself on us yet. But it's coming.
Me: It hasn't given birth yet is all. You can watch it getting bigger though, something's cookin in there.
Harry: Man, wtf. Why is my lack of motivation so enormous?! I can't believe my most productive studying days are the ones I played 3 hours of ping pong on.
Me: Hahahaha. Just do it.
Harry: Well, I'm gonna sign off AIM @ 3, see what happens, lol. Cuts the activation energy in half.
Me: Hahaha, are you hoping it'd act like a co-enzyme?
Harry: No, AIM is a competitive inhibitor that binds with higher affinity than studying molecules to my attention receptors.
Me: Hahaha, is it sad that we're talking like this?
Harry: What's even sadder is when I start studying and will be able to talk in phys terms instead of biochem terms. All downhill.

So as you can see, we're humongous dorks. :-P Oh, on a completely different note, I'd like to thank the people who sent me questions on my formspring.me. You can either go to this link here to see my answers, or follow my Twitter on the left sidebar. Keep sending me questions and I'll answer them when I can!

Also, I was talking to a few people earlier tonight. It seems my ambitions to lose weight have failed yet again. :-/ I'm kind of at a loss on what to do . . . I talked to PYB of pickingyourbrains and he suggested 1.) eliminate all junk food from my diet and 2.) run 3 miles/day, 4-5x/week. Now, I'm a horrible runner. I simply suck at running. It'll take me a good 3-4 weeks to work my way up to 3 miles, if I'm diligent.

What I've settled on for the moment is to eat a bit healthier (though I eat fairly healthy, but it could be healthier still) and divide my meals into 5-6 smaller meals/day, increase the distance I run (by about 0.5 miles/week until 3 miles), and maintain what little weights I currently do. And do all this hopefully at least 3x a week. So to all readers out there, any advice for me? IM/email/leave a comment please! I'd love to lose 20-30 lbs by the end of May.

---TANGENT---
So despite the gchat convo above with Harry, I did manage to get some studying done. However, I spent the majority of my day catching up on blogs. So to the following bloggers, if you haven't already, you'll see a huge wave of comments from me on your blogs.

Earl Grey of Part of the Q
Joe of Being Bi in college
Manu of Rendre Bleu

I still have many blogs on my "to read" list bookmarked in my internet browser. So hang on tight and know I'll get to you (some day . . .). Now go over and welcome those bloggers to the blogosphere! :-D
---END TANGENT---

At Your Service

This morning (Saturday) I was scheduled to volunteer at the free clinic for the uninsured run by the med students here. I was to do patient education on how to best manage chronic conditions (such as high blood pressure, diabetes, etc). Well, that wasn't what I ended up spending the vast majority of my morning doing.

Instead, I spent the vast majority of my morning translating Mandarin Chinese into English and back for this Chinese woman who spoke very little English. You know, I never fully appreciated how difficult it is to translate until now. Even though I feel I did a fairly good job translating, there were random words and phrases that eluded me - words and phrases that I know I know. Like "cancer," I know how to say "cancer" in Chinese, but it's still eluding me! Argh.

She came in with her husband who would've served as her translator, except he was called back to a different room than she was. So basically, without me it would've been near-impossible to do anything for this woman. So it felt great that I was able to help out in such a capacity. Things go really slowly when translations are necessary.

Afterwards, and after her very emphatic "thank yous" to the other med students, the doctor, and me, she asked me when I moved here from China. -_- They always ask me that, without fail. Imagine her surprise when I told her I was born in Chicago. "But your Chinese is so good! Where did you learn to speak it?" My parents speak it at home . . . so we speak it at home (is that so unusual?). Sigh, such is the curse of being an ABC.

Anywho, while I was actually doing my real role at the free clinic, I had the opportunity to talk to this diabetic woman waiting for labs to be done. She used to work at the hospital that our med school's affiliated with, until she was laid off and currently has no insurance. And here she is going to a free clinic run by med students from the med school affiliated with the hospital she was laid off from. That's some twisted irony there. But she was great about it, took it all in stride.

On a completely different note, I finally finished watching the anime Death Note today. It's sooo good!! I love the detective and scheming of it all. It's almost like a twisted kind of Sherlock Holmes (great movie, btw, if you haven't seen it yet). Now I can (hopefully) study for real . . . tomorrow that is.

A Much Needed Break

I'm home right now for the next 4 days. Hurray for short fall study break! Too bad it's rather cold at home, as my parents are resisting turning on the heat for as long as possible.

I got my grade on my pathophysiology exam on Monday. I got an A!! :D Apparently our class murdered the average, as it's usually around 60-70% whereas our average was around 81%. There were some poorly worded questions, though none particularly difficult.

This week was my first full week of work. It's tiring - so many tumor samples. Here's a pic of the lobby of my research building. I work on the first floor off to the far right corner.

And 3 days ago I got a package in the mail. When I opened it up, I saw that it was a package from my friend JW-F from New York. It was a venus flytrap!! I've no idea how I'm going to manage to keep it alive in the long-run, but it's really really cool. Maybe it'll eat some of the bugs crawling about my apartment.

I think I'll call it "Zetsu" (villain from the anime Naruto). Yes, I'm dorky like that.

And finally, a few pics to indicate that autumn has truly begun here in the midwest.

Lastly, I added in the sidebar of this blog a section called "Cast of Characters" as I realize that it may be difficult to follow who routinely pops up in my blog, as I code names (because I don't feel like inventing names for people). You may have to scroll down a bit to get to that section.

And Fall Semester Begins!

Oh man, this is going to be a long post consummating the last several days.

New Apartment
So I moved in on Sunday. I was (am) so excited about this apartment with this set of roommates (though 2 of them were my roommates last year too). The apartment is SO much larger than the one last year, more than twice as large, and it's in a great location. It's actually right next to the gym and behind an all-girls' dorm, haha - not that there's anything to see as the windows are usually drawn on both their end and ours. And I've several friends who live in apartments above me, so that's exciting as well.

There are some peculiarities about this apartment, seeing as it's rather old. Most of the rooms only have 2-pronged sockets, which is utterly stupid. There's random damage and wear here and there, probably due to its age and previous tenants. All this is more than tolerable and to be expected. But, the internet sucks so bad. First of all, we're not allowed to torrent or anything. And the internet is slow, so direct downloading takes forever and streaming videos also takes a while. I've been kind of cut off from my anime and porn, alas. I might go insane. And that's where the library with the university's MUCH quicker wireless comes in. I'm so going to be living part-time in the library, which is annoying. I'm currently trying to convince my roommates to get DSL, but I've made little progress as they seem content . . . for now.

Other than all that, moving in has been a very slow process and there are still lots of boxes that need to be fully unpacked, and stuff that need to be put away in their proper places. Unfortunately, my roommates are too busy/lazy. And it's gotten to the point where I've put away some of their stuff for them in order to make room. Anyway, don't want to do that.

Classes
Ah, classes. I don't really like some of mine this semester. I have to take Evolution, which is okay. And General Ecology is the only other one that fits my schedule (gah, don't want to take that "hippie" class). In both classes there are couple people I know, but don't know well. They're more like good acquaintances. I also anticipate both classes to be easy, which is good.

And then there's Chinese 104, an ultimate class. It's so intense, as 95% of what's spoken is in Chinese. It's really cool and forces me to get better in so many aspects. And the instructor is from Beijing and has an aura that kind of suppresses you so you don't really want to speak, because you fear feeling inferior. My friend, JW-M calls it a "suppression aura," lol. But it's still a really great class, I can already tell. And again, it's intense, and it'll be a lot of work. I'm glad I remember as many characters as I do, otherwise it might be really hard.

Today in Chinese, the only person I know in the class sold me out. At the end of class as we were preparing to leave, one of the students said he couldn't read and write ANY Chinese characters other than his name, whereas the other people in class could at least recognize what was written on the board. So the instructor asks if there was anyone who was good with characters. My "friend" singled and volunteered me, so now I'm going to have to help him in class and afterwards (if he wants) with learning Chinese characters. Thanks a lot "friend."

So this guy, this freshman, I'm now "helping" is an interesting fellow. He says he doesn't speak very well, but is of course a "native or near-native" speaker otherwise he wouldn't be in the class. He has an accent on his Mandarin I can't quite place, but I think it's almost a Cantonese one. And his English is slightly accented too, which confused me when he said he wasn't really good at speaking Chinese. Anyway, while I don't like Asian accents, they can sound sexy if it's a slight accent spoken by the right person. He's definitely one of them. I must admit, I have a tendency to develop small crushes on some people in my small classes (like Spanish). In my Chinese class, it's him and this other freshman girl who's Cantonese. She's so cute when she speaks, and with that slight accent too. Too bad nothing will ever come of any of this, as after class everyone goes their separate ways and disappears. Sigh.

Oh, I also stupidly bought both the traditional and simplified versions of the textbook when I only needed one or the other. And both recommended dictionaries when I had one of my own. The place I bought them from has a 3-day return policy, and since my dad bought these books for me with his credit card while he was in town and I don't have his credit card, I can't return these books. So now I'm trying to sell them to some freshman who doesn't have a book yet in my class. Alas, most of them seem to have their books now. Crap!

My last class is my Environmental Journalism class, which is a seminar I have on Friday from 9am to noon. Gah, 3 hours! It's also the only class I have with any of my friends, so I only really see anyone on Fridays. I'm going to be so out of the loop this semester, and that's sad. Oh well. I am looking forward to that class, despite it being 3 hours on a Friday morning.

Other
Not much left to tell, other than I visited SR-F and JW-F to see their new turtles. The turtles have taken a strange liking to hiding behind the filter, or sit on top of the heater. It's weird. They're called Max (Max Bruch, the composer) and Mahler by the way. I also went running with JW-M yesterday evening, that was good. We were practicing our Chinese against each other as we ran, and for a white guy who's entering his 4th year of Chinese here at the university, he's pretty good. He has most of the accents and tones down.

I've also been thinking for the last several weeks about "coming out" to SR-F and JW-M about my bisexuality. Of all my friends at the university, they are definitely my two closest friends. I don't consider myself to have a "best friend" as I have several close friends that the qualities of a "best friend" are divided amongst. That's how I think of it anyway, I don't have a consummate friend that "fulfills" every aspect of me. That's actually kind of hard, as I tend to be such a random person with many random idiosyncrasies and "secrets" (though I suppose everyone has their secrets). In any case, the opportunity to "come out" to them hasn't presented itself, and I think I'll have to make it, which is annoying.

And last, completely unrelated to everything else in this post, JW-F wants to start a chamber string orchestra as a branch of the main Pops Orchestra. The program she has planned is really awesome and I really want to be a part of that. This, of course, was inspired by no other than the anime Nodame Cantabile, a great anime for anyone who likes classical music, has played an instrument, and likes comedies. It's definitely in my top 5 animes. But yeah, the orchestra should be awesome. This also means I'll be VERY busy this semester, with Pops Orchestra taking up 3 hrs/week, the string orchestra taking up 2 hrs/week, small ensembles (trio) taking up 2-6 hrs/week, my job taking up about 3 hrs/week, and research taking up probably 9-12 hrs/week. Yeah . . . that's a lot of time commitment. On top of all that, med school interviews (hopefully, here's me praying).