Merry Christmas!

Ha. You guys thought I would never post here. Well here I am! And wishing everyone a wonderful and safe Holidays :)

Peace.

Bucket List

Never too young to come up with a bucket list! Especially when you have time on your hands...
I'll add to this list as I think of more. Then again, with this track record of our blog, who knows when I'll get to it again.

1. Get courtside seats to a Lakers game.
2. Skydiving (I know, I know, so trite.)
3. Eat at >50% of Michelin Star rated restaurants in the U.S.
4. Donate a substantial amount to a charity I love
5. Be a mentor to someone. And not just in the professional development sense.
6. Visit every continent. Yes, including Antarctica.
7. Get on national TV...(this might be combined with #1. Even a camera pan-by is fine)
8. Get either really good at Spanish or Chinese, or learn another language from scratch
9. Laugh so hard I cry.

...to be continued?

I feel kind of guilty for not really having finals (only have one, and I'm taking the class credit/no credit). It's also kind of lame having free time when no one else is around to play with me. hahaha. It gives my mind too much time and freedom to run rampant and be stupid!

3:33

I wish I could be a more multi-dimensional writer. I understand that everyone has his or her own writing style, but it would be great if mine varied from time to time. In my Creative Nonfiction class, I get to read awesome pieces of work that vary from funny to powerful to biting to exceedingly creative. I think I have a flair of the funny (in the David Sedaris sense) but everything else is seriously lacking. And even Sedaris can write moving pieces. The use of metaphors and poetic imagery baffles me. I am at once both turned off by its floweryness and amazed by the beautiful and vivid language. Or a lyrical piece of "disjoint" writing that forms a cohesive piece (Son of Mr. Green Jeans by Dinty Moore is a wonderful work).

Part of it might be that I lack moving stories to tell. I blame that on a "perfect" childhood in a quiet suburb where the most distressing thing that happened in my elementary school days was when I didn't win a local competition. When people write amazing pieces about family struggles, crime, etc. I get envious that I don't have such stories to evoke inspiration from. This envy is ridiculous. The other part is that I'm just not creative. I dislike poetry, interpretive ______ (dance, art, fill in the blank with most anything) and have little ability to think of large abstract things. I like to tell it as it is. And then if it gets too serious, through some humor in because I'm too immature to face something too dramatic or difficult.

All this limits me as writer. I don't write too much, but if I did, would I turn into a Dan Brown? Where every story is the same and you just plug the plot into a formula? Well, hopefully, at least my writing itself is better, if not the template. Plus, he's also obscenely rich, which leaves the question: would I take the fame and money if I were not proud of the work and knew that it sucked?

I'm not sure. But I'm leaning towards the answer to this question: "Did Obama accept the Nobel Peace Prize?"

First Writing Assignment! (that I took seriously)

Prompt: Write about a body part
Style: Personal essay
Disclaimers: 1. My use of quotes do not mean that they are direct quotations; I do not remember the exact words spoken, but instead have chosen words to capture the intent of the speaker while doing my best to stay true to what they actually said.
2. I am NOT a Democrat.

Earily Big

“Pinch your nose with your right hand and move your other arm through the space. There. Now swing the left arm back and forth like a nose trunk. You’re an elephant!”

Only years later did I realize that my cousin was not affectionately playing animal games with me, but rather mocking my large ears, implicitly comparing them to Dumbo the elephant. He was also smart enough to have taken a picture of my posture. My famous pose is now captured for eternity and proudly displayed on my grandmother’s wall.

Indeed, my ears are quite large. This is especially apparent after a haircut, when they stick out like wings on an airplane. They’ve been yanked by my uncle, flicked by my cousins, and laughed at by my grandma. Only my father, whom I inherited the oversized hearing device from, had anything positive to say. He reassured me: “In Chinese societies, having big ears is a good thing. It means that you are smart. Buddha had big ears!” I’d much rather be compared to Jesus. For whatever reason, walking across water seems a little more appealing than sitting under a tree and meditating. But I guess I’ll take what I can get. Big-eared buffoons can’t be choosy.

Having large ears has consequences that most do not consider. For one, it is near impossible to find a pair of reasonably-priced headphones that fit. Most earpieces simply fall out of my giant abyss of an ear. It’s like trying to feed dimes in an arcade machine that only takes quarters. You can insert them all you want, but they invariably just come right back out. Why is it that size 42 pants are always on sale, but large headphones are so expensive? Also, beanies have become a fashion faux pas. My ears protrude quite comically through the skin-tight material. At first I just thought that I had purchased oddly shaped beanies. I told myself that they were on sale for a reason. One full-priced beanie later, I finally concluded that this type of headwear was definitely a no-go.

Most curious, my big ears do not make me genetically superior in the auditory sense. I’m not really sure how the ear works—something about a hammer, anvil, and stirrup, and I think there’s some drum in there as well. Equipped with this highly sophisticated scientific knowledge, I hypothesize that the vastness of my ear creates too large a cavity for sound to effectively disperse. In any case, I apologize to my neighbors who must overhear the audio commentary of the epic Lakers games I religiously watch. Along the same lines, I hope that those near me enjoy the music on my iPod. If not, I’d gladly take donations for better-fitting earphones.

But there are some perks. As I have gotten older, the mocking and physical torment on my ears has lessened, and I am liberated from my own self-consciousness to laugh along when jokes are made. And it’s nice to have a distinguishing feature that I can talk about when others complain about body parts I didn’t know existed. “Ugh I have such bad cuticles!” “My hair has so many split ends!” “Um…I have big ears?”

Besides, I think big ears have now become fashionable. I suddenly see them appearing in all sorts of cartoons. And I cannot help but feel that I partook in this revolution that brought justice and pride to all big-eared people everywhere. Because in the November of 2008, I took a stand. At that moment, I decided that enough was enough. I was tired of the mockery, ill-fitting headphones, and disgrace from the beanies. I was tired of all if it. It was time to vote in a big-eared President of the United States. I had had enough of the elephants.