post grad angst

I'm feeling the post-grad angst that results from not immediately utilizing whatever I've learned from the last four years (what did I learn?) and/or not embarking on what you would call a stable career. Whatever. Here are some things that have happened to me this month.

• The A team won regionals! Such an exciting game. We won in overtime with Andy's sudden death goal. Then I proceeded to watch them guzzle cheap beer out of a rusty trophy. The boys are going to Nationals and I'm going along with them as their personal trainer (hah). We're leaving next week.
• I finished all my undergraduate courses ever. Hooray. Obviously that was worth commemorating with an outfit of the day photo and sixteen straight hours of uninterrupted sleep.
• Been spending a lot of time going to LA trying to adopt a dog. That didn't go so well, and I'm convinced I'm not supposed to get a dog. I guess it's like Shannon says. "You know you've made it somewhere when you finally get a dog. You're never leaving there." Guess my little furry buddy will have to wait until I move to the UK forever.
• Had a good Saturday in Beverly Hills while Udi gave us the mini TMZ tour. We found Sur and Pump and are planning our trashy bar crawl through WeHo. 

the almost grad

So I haven't been blogging, and I know why. My lovely friend Anna bought me a journal for Christmas and honestly, it's been consuming whatever discombobulated thoughts enter my mind and getting fat off of the chaos that regularly invades my brain. A lot of it is way too unorganized to put here, and that's okay. I've been really into it because it's also an outlet for me to put my drawings and doodles in. Lately, I've been illustrating more for the New University and it makes me genuinely happy to see it in print and having people tell me they enjoy them. Maybe I'll start posting them here?

Continuing from where I left off some odd two months ago is kind of interesting to me. In retrospect, I'm not sure how I've been surviving this quarter. It started off fantastic. This is the one quarter in all my years attending university that I felt genuinely excited to be in class (first year doesn't count because I think most of the "excitement" was fear). Whether or not that initial glee was perfect dosage of caffeination or the actual content of the class is debatable because that excitement lasted maybe three weeks. There has been so much happening outside of lecture that makes me feel not exactly happy, but just the right amount of uncomfortable. So many good things happened, and so many not so good things happened. I'm more worried than ever about leaving my bubble of undergradness and trying to not suck as an adult in the real world. Thooooough, maybe nothing actually matters because our perception of reality is wrong and everything is a product of our consciousness keeping us all from actually seeing truth (taking a class with Donald Hoffman and it's my favorite class and he's giving a TED talk next month or so -fangirling-).

Oh and I turned twenty-two sometime around the beginning of this month and was embarrassing in public. But I didn't sing the damn Tswizzle song. I've also been using my instax camera a bit more. It's nice to have photos on your computer and phone and all, but physical print and paper make me happy in ways I can't explain.

So after a quarter of eating like this and sleeping very little, I guess it's no surprise that my body has given up on me and let me become very very sick.

To kick off finals season, we had a very fun practice in which we just scrimmaged for two hours. I bothered them into taking a group photo. They weren't very pleased. We're a handsome bunch though, aren't we?

Napalm tried to help me study for bio, but it didn't really help. Then I felt the ten week feels and had Anna capture it.

And then puppy-viewing study breaks.

And of course, we had our gift exchange and took these pictures to pretend we like each other. Sipping champagne and gifting... the day before a final.

Happy holidays, friends.

it's almost christmas and the last time i posted was in august

Oops.

I blame the general sense of emptiness Irvine creates. Other than the void that is slowly eating away at my soul and will to live, I think I've had a really busy and productive (questionable) fall quarter. I'm in my penultimate quarter as an undergrad, and the realization is dawning on me and now I think I'm just constantly in a state of self-delusion that keeps me from just breaking down and throwing myself off the nearest highway overpass.

So to begin this long recap, I went on a short trip to Malaysia early on in September. It's always a reminder how different my life would have been if I grew up there instead of the US. I'm not saying that it would have been a bad thing to grow up there (curry laksa errrryday), but I would get into so much more trouble for being me than I do here. After a detour to Langkawi, we saw my mom's mom and I briefly thought about writing about it, but I'll save it for another day.

This is a picture of the Marina Bay Sands hotel from the Gardens by the Bay. Singapore was our last stop. The last time my mom went to Singapore, she went with my grandparents and her siblings. She took my brother and I here and we took a million photos on our iPhones that will never do them justice. I honestly don't know what to do with the photos I've taken from here. Suggestions (other than post them on Facebook, bleh) ?

After a whirlwind of rushed traveling, I came home to pack up my life into the back of my car to drive the 300-odd miles down to my new apartment. No, seriously, I had a day in between arriving back in California and having to drive down to the southern half. It was kind of a relief, to be honest. I had been home for four months, and that's all the motivation I need to never move home again (Sorry, Ma). As per usual, we started the term by celebrating Lauren's birthday, which coincidentally solidified all of us being of legal US drinking age. We went to a rooftop bar in DTLA, and I'm still trying to piece together the remnants of that night three months later. Twas fun, and I'm genuinely afraid to divulge anything else.

I did something kind of adventurous this quarter and joined the roller hockey club. The fastest way to understand/appreciate a sport is to play it. My initial expectations for this were that they were just a bunch of people (girls and guys) who shot pucks around and had friendly scrimmages. Nope. So I don't know where I got the impression that it was a gender-balanced team, but to date, there are three girls on a team of almost twenty people. Whoops. There are no individual games, just tournaments in different cities, we have a coach, and have practices. Guh. I had also overestimated my fitness and some couple of weeks ago strained/tore my quad. Guuuuh. But, it hasn't been all bad things. In fact, I really enjoy being part of a team, and everyone is there to have fun. Plus, I enjoy making everyone cringe with my bruise snaps. It's fun. At the very least, I can always say I scored one goal. No one can ever say I trolled roller hockey. Never. Next thing I wanna do is learn how to stop without falling on my ass.

It was recently Thanksgiving, so I went home. This Thanksgiving was extra important because it was my mother's birthday. I'm not sure if it's legal to post it on the Internet, but she's hit the big 50. For years, she's been moaning about how she's never gone to the top of the hiking trail behind our house. So after some planning mishaps about a surprise brunch, we scrapped that, and I took her and a bunch of her friends hiking. I think she was going to strangle me halfway up for thinking this is what she wanted, but I mean, hey, what are endless mimosas in comparison to getting up before 8AM and hiking 3,000 feet up? The important part is that we made it up. All the way to the tippy top. So Happy Birthday, Mumsy. Look how pretty it can be up there when it actually rains vs. when we're smack dab in the middle of summer and breathing on something might start a fire.

 Overate as usual but didn't go out for the Black Friday madness. I did participate in some online shopping, but I feel endlessly guilty. One, for spending tons of money I don't really have yet and two, for feeding into a machine that contributes to myriads of things I don't believe in...but that 30% Zara discount. I hate myself. Anyway, Zach came up the next day and we went to the Sharks v. Ducks game that Saturday. Mom had the hookup for row 1 seats, but she's not that into hockey. Seeing the opportunity to employ my new appreciation for the sport, of course I pounced on those. Zach embarrassed us by being the only one in three sections to have a Ducks jersey on. We sat by the most obnoxious Sharks fans though. Just those three people who think it's remotely funny to use the words "jimmeny-cricket" in earnest. After the 20th time, it just gets real annoying real fast. They also ordered 8 rounds of Jack and Cokes, so it's not like their insults against the Ducks got any better as time went on. Shittalking is part of the experience, I just wish they were good at it. I think Zach may have ruined my chances of being a good Sharks fan. Having been introduced to the game by watching Ducks games, I know more about that team than I do about the Sharks. All I know really is that Couture is amazing and Pavelski is a babe and Scott is a GIANT. It was only a good game in the third period after they pulled beautiful ginger god Frederick Anderson out. Poor guy. But yeah. These seats. Every time someone got checked into the boards, it's like I was getting checked into the boards. We were close enough to make intimate eye contact with both teams. Pretty sure that's what Zach was doing anyway. Is that flirting? Is that how one flirts? What does it mean when they look your way, hold eye contact, and spit a little? Is it going down? Did Zach just snag a date with Cory Perry? Why is nothing in this scenario remotely surprising to me?

Yup. Pretty cool weekend. Enjoy these other photos from the Japanese Friendship Garden + Charlie derpface bonus.

 

canals + tulips aka TFIOS

Let it be known that I did not enjoy The Fault In Our Stars like every other person and their mothers. It was a sad story, but it also pissed me off because what teenagers were that eloquent and witty and why wasn't there an Augustus Waters equivalent when I still believed in romantic mush like that? And how pretentious was that unlit cigarette metaphor. GUH. Nevertheless, I do applaud you John Green for tugging at my heart strings about Peter van Houten's backstory. He was the only part I liked.

If you're wondering what else John Green got right, Amsterdam is damn romantic though. I would love to go back. I almost went back before I came back to California (but bank account statements said otherwise). Yes, the allure of, shall we say, illicit activities is an attraction of this city, but it is not the only one. I am so smitten.

Fun fact: the average height of people in the Netherlands is much much much much much taller than Christine or I. Emerging from the train station, we immediately had to seek out a map. The only one we found, however, was very very very much taller than either Christine or I. Mattie, the only one who could probably comfortably read this map, was on her own quest for a toilet. Using my camera phone to snap pictures of the taller regions of the map, and Christine using her hawk eye abilities to locate which areas to take pictures of, we got a good system of pointing and picture-taking going. We turned to the sound of "Um, excuse me do you guys need help?" and were met with the very entertained looks of two very tall, very blonde Dutch men.

Another thing you don't see on this video: we went back for stroop waffle McFlurries at least three times in the span of two days. Also not on this video: we went to the red light district and had a crazy night involving a couple prostitutes. Kidding. But we went and it made us feel kind of sad.

I am a little obsessed with tulips, by the way.

tourist waffles

We started the trek to Brussels early in the morning. So early, in fact, that the hostel had not yet put out breakfast. St. Christopher's Inn next to Gare du Nord has the best bread and butter. I thought I was going to marry all of the bread and butter in France. By "marry", I mean consume. Anyway, being denied early access to breakfast, Mattie, Christine, and I headed to Gare du Nord, stomachs empty and anxious to find our train. If you're wondering where Maxine is, we had to abandon her because her love of French lingerie kept her detained. We got to the station much too early, so the logical thing to do was have Christine run (literally, run) back to the hostel to grab an entire plastic bag of bread. She ended up slipping, scraping her knees on the well-paved streets of Paris. You can take the girl out of France, but then France will try to maim her. Paris is feisty. The bread was really good though.

Once in Brussels, it was also too early for anything to be open. With Mattie's data-enabled phone (everyone, take note that AT&T sucks and T-Mobile is the only one who understands study abroad needs) and a shitty map in hand, we made our way through the fog to the hostel. Understand that up until this point, we'd been enjoying balmy -gasp- mid-sixty degree Fahrenheit weather. That, to us, was like a SoCal summer after having been in the UK for four months. So off into the cold we go, finally finding refuge in our hostel. This hostel was luxury compared to what we had been staying in. PRIVATE BATHROOM + ONLY THE THREE OF US IN THERE. By this destination, we had walked about 10+ miles a day, so we were ready to have a chill day in Brussels.

Apparently, you can do Brussels in a day, and we had this nifty map to tell us how. The highlights of this have to be us wandering around for cheap Chinese food in Belgium and somehow wandering into a very interesting market place. This particular marketplace was peculiar because everyone was only there to watch it end. Once it ended, a lot of the vendors actually gave away a lot of their wares for free or abandoned it on the ground. Or maybe the highlights of this leg of the trip was scarfing down cheap uncooked convenience store veggies because we are cheap and had a bouquet of pommes frites earlier (fancy fries/chips to you) and dancing contemporary dance in our beautiful, private hostel room.

Whatever the case...pay attention to those waffles in this video. Gor-geous.

we are the champignons

Otherwise known as that time we went to Paris.

I've never been so afraid to speak in my entire life. I don't speak a lick of French. On top of that, the only only two words I do know, bonjour and merci, were so poorly pronounced that the Parisians who had to come in contact with my awful French immediately switched to English, much to their irritation. I spent half my conversations there apologizing to French people and the other half asking Mattie for help. It wasn't my favorite stop.

But it was so so so beautiful, and the butter was so so so good. And the men were all so cute in the skinny French kind of way. And well dressed. I had to wipe the drool off my keyboard, sorry. It's a city worth a revisit, and I hope I get to go back someday...but with French speakers.

Some key points:

• The wine we're drinking in front of the Eiffel Tower was really cheap but not good. All because we didn't have a bottle opener. Shame on us.
• I think we redefined cheap. At the hostel, we had an assembly line fashioning sandwiches out of the bread, ham, and cheese provided at the free breakfast. Oops.
• Climbed the Arc de Triomphe for free thanks to Mattie's basic French.
• Saw the Moulin Rouge at night (not filmed because my phone died). It is definitely not as romantic as the movie makes it seem. It was in the seediest area.
• Lingerie shopping in Paris is so fun.
• Paul is a born tour guide.