Why I Love NYU

I hated my program. I don't like the fact that it expanded so aggressively that new students are random and boring. I loved hanging out with classmates from my year. They are interesting people. I don't like the new teachers recruited, many of which are condescending, and you can tell they are losers. They might be successful in their careers, but they are simply pathetic. I wouldn't trade my life with theirs for heaven. I don't like my department is paying absolutely no attention to student evaluations. If they had even a little bit, damn Adam and Bill can kill John sweet goodbye.

On the other hand, I do love NYU. It is caring, dynamic, funny and exciting.

1. Today I bought a really expensive bra. Normally I wouldn't spend so much on a piece of clothes, but I need to give myself an incentive for the unbearable hard work for next week. I accidentally left the bra on the 4th floor study lounge. Three hours later, I realized I did not have the bra with me. When I thought I had lost it forever, I found it on the same spot where I had left it. I was so grateful.

2. I have been working on my thesis paper for half a semester. I like my subject, which is the communication between sex workers and NPOs. However, I had a hard time finding secondary research. I didn't know what key words to use, where to find statistics, or which database to use. I sent a letter asking for help from librarians, anticipating nothing valuable would come out. They responded really fast, and even offered me personal meeting. The librarian expressed interest in my research, showed respect to my work and spend one hour going through different websites and databases. What she found in an hour was more than what I found in two days. Librarians are willing to help, as well as professional.

3. The database is amazing. It has all the information I wanted.

4. I can always find the book I want to read in the library.

5. People watch out for each other. On the street in the East Village, I see people remind one another who dropped something.

6. Love the gym. Not the doorman though.

7. Love Washington Square Park. The musicians, babies, and senior citizens sitting at leisure never fail to remind me how beautiful life is.

8. Physicians at the Health Center are professional. They did me a huge favor--helped me get rid of the pain-in-the-ass acnes on my face. The counseling service helped me get to know myself, and understand what is beneath my anger.

Can I leave the program and stay in NYU? 

Love is the most beautiful existence

I find some people are unable to love others and be loved. In the novel Norwegian Woods, Nagasawa was unable to love other people, but he was passionately loved; In the novel The Sense of an Ending, Tony was not possible to be loved. In some sense, he does not feel he deserved any form of love. The world is such an unequal, but in a weird sense, equal place: some people get their happiness from love; some people from solitude, which means not being bothered by love at all; some people are miserable for a lack of  love; some people literally suffocates from too much love and attention, like the girl in the Korean movie Beauty.

I can never picture what an orphan must feel like. Whenever I feel blue, the thought of home give me a lot of power. The love from my family makes my heart feel secure and strong, and thus I can be spared of unpleasant silly conjecture, which usually is the cause of sadness.

People are born unequal. Why does the world work this way? I struggle between going to 28st and 5 Avenue to buy bubble milk tea or not, eating BBQ or Chinese hotpot, going to class or calling in sick, while people in depression struggle between jumping from a 40-meter building or not; people in poverty struggle between feeding child A or child B. And what's more, people are so forgetful: this moment I cry for a documentary on Africa poverty, next minute I leave half of my plate of food untouched.

It is April, and the weather is still sooooo damn cold. I panicked for the late coming of Spring. It might not come to earth this year at all. The constant coldness is killing me. I want to have my hair cut short again.

Here is a display of how my mind wanders from love to hairstyle. Recently I have been so fucked by homework, I have the feeling that I am losing my uniqueness. Everybody has their uniqueness, which wears off as one grows up. Isn't it sad?

As always, je suis toujours comme ca. And that's the problem. 

Young for You

Chaos and Order. Love and Indifference

One vital difference between human and other animals is that humans do not have natural enemy, so they can watch and judge other creatures fight and struggle, as a saviour.

Now let's create a scenario: dinosaurs are not extinct. They are mortal enemy of human beings. Humans are vulnerable and defenseless. What impact could this have on humans' attitude towards life and love? For sure, two things: their way of dealing with nice things and fear.

Off the topic a bit, I had two experiences that shadowed me.

The first one came when I overdosed. As I described in my previous blog, I felt I lost control of everything, and got totally paranoid.

The second time came when I was swimming. I was trained in a 4-inch deep swimming pool, which is very shallow. I have never thought of swimming elsewhere, either the sea or deep-water area. The other day I went into a gym. It was not until I was in the deep-water zone did I realize the pool was not standardly structured. In the same lane, water depth ranges gradually from 3 inch to 12 inch. When I swam to about 8 inch, I suddenly realized I was in deep water. I was electrified and rigid with fear. I told myself that I could do it. I couldn't breathe. Though I survived, I couldn't swim for a whole year. Luckily I overcame my fear last month.

I started to think how I would react if I was confronted with danger on a daily basis. I would have to be alert and worry about death. I would put more emphasis on beautiful things, things that make me happy and bring out the bright side of me.

In other words, in a different universe, I wouldn't let things go even if they hurt me, as long as I enjoy spending time with them.

How to Amuse Yourself

I am sitting in the depressing school library. I have accumulated so much homework that I have to sit down and do the work. I am not happy about this, so I need to calm myself down, and entertain myself. Here is what I did:

Have bubble milk tea.
Buy facial mask. ( In other words, shopping)
Eat great great food.--very important
Wear heavy coats so I could be warm in the damn wind.
Bring swimming equipment to swim later.
Promise yourself sth. fun to do later. (In this case, to choose a tattoo pattern for my back)
Sneak a cigarette. ( Not recommended, but research shows smoking brings out a good mood)

What do you do when you are cornered with sweet homework?

what are people around me doing at this specific moment(5:17pm)? One is texting, with a serious expression. I guess she is writing a email to discuss a group project; Two are smiling to their ipads. I guess they are watching videos; One is looking out of the window, contemplative. She must be thinking: God, yesterday it was all dark at 5pm; today it is now as bright as 3pm. Is Spring on her way? A girl in orange is staring blankly ahead. She must have lost it. She is one step from mental collapse. Nobody is showing a happy face. Nobody loves what they have been reading? Or they are smiling in their hearts? What are their individual plans for tonight? 

We are in the same room. Does my existence (or my brain activity) have an influence on their decisions? 

Seeing My Motherland from an American's Eye

I have been reading novels concerning China written by Americans. I started to see things that my eyes had decided to ignore.

River Town is by Peter Hessler. He went to a remote small city, Fu Ling, in Sichuan province in the early 90s. He was a volunteer from the Peace Corps, and he taught English Literature in a local college. He got in touch with college students. His impression was that his students thought in the same way. In class it was like he was facing a group of people instead of many different individuals.

When he described the city, he wrote "Sichuanese cities are often timeless. They look too dirty to be new, and too uniform and ugly to be old. The majority of Fuling's buildings look as if they were dropped here about ten years ago, while in fact the city has existed on the same site for more than three thousand years. Originally it was a capital of the Ba Kingdom, an independent tribe that was conquered by the Chinese, and after that nearly every dynasty left it with a different name, a different administrative center. But all of those dynasties have passed with hardly a mask left behind. The buildings could be the buildings of any Chinese city whose development has allowed its history. Their purpose is simply to hold people, the more than 200,000 people who spent their days climbing the staircases, fighting the traffic, working and eating, buying and selling."

I wish I could see marks of ancient civilization in China. There are so many beautiful Chinese legends. I still remembered vividly when I first touched the warm West Lake water in Hangzhou, I was connected to Bai Niangzi for a second. I will never forget the touch. What would it be like if there were relics lying around.

There is a shocking fact I did not know--" ...even as late as the early 1800s it had been illegal for a Chinese to teach the language to foreigners, and a number of Chinese were imprisoned and even executed for tutoring young Englishmen. This bit of history fascinated me; how many languages had been sacred and forbidden to outsiders? Certainly, those laws had been changed more than a century ago, but China was still ambivalent about opening to the outside world and language was still at the heart of this issue."

Now I come to think about it, it makes great sense on my personal level. From when I was a little girl I was reluctant to share my stuff with my friends. I did not like others to hold my baby doll. As I grew older, I realized what I had been doing, and I tried hard to learn to share. I always contributed my smallness to my being the spoiled only child. However, it could also be explained by the Chinese tradition of keeping the good stuff to themselves and fight back foreigners, such as the Huns. As to attitudes towards foreigners, the Chinese distinguished themselves from other "uncivilized" ethnic groups, while the English chose to spread their culture and colonize them.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

From the title, I assumed it would be a sweet book, like a dessert, something that makes you happy and pink. However, it turned out to be graphic and blue.

I have always believed in love. It exists as long as you approach it from the right way. In a healthy relationship, a couple should be best friends. They should be each other's extended family, the one who the other could turn to and talk to when he/she is in distress.

In one story, there is a doctor, Mel. He talked about his day to his wife and friends over dinner. There was an old couple hit by a car driven by a drunk teenager. Mel said: I dropped in to see each of them everyday, sometimes twice a day. Casts and bandages, head to foot, the both of them. You know, you've seen it in the movies. That's just the way they looked, just like in the movies. Little eye-holes and nose-holes and mouth-holes. And she had to have her legs slung up on top of it. Well, the husband was very depressed for the longest while. Even after he found out that his wife was going to pull through, he was still very depressed. Not about the accident, though. I mean, the accident was one thing, but it wasn't everything. I'd get up to his mouth-hole, you know, and he would say no, it wasn't the accident exactly but it was because he couldn't see her through his eye-holes. He said that was what was making him feel so bad. Can you imagine? I'm telling you, the man's heart was breaking because he couldn't turn his goddamn head and see his goddamn wife."

Mel looked around the table and shook his head at what he was going to say.

"I mean, it was killing the old fart because he couldn't look at the fucking woman." 

Mel continued:"You guys (a couple) have been together eighteen months and you love each other. You have both been married before, just like us. And you probably loved each other people before that too, even. Terri and I have been together five years, been married for four. And the terrible thing, the terrible thing is, but the good thing too, the saving grace, you might say, is that if something happened to one of us--excuse me for saying that--but if something happened to one of us tomorrow, I think the other one, the other person, would grieve for a while, you know, but then the surviving party would go out and love again, have someone else soon enough. All this, all of this love we are talking about, it would just be a memory. Maybe not even a memory. Am I wrong? Am I way off base? Because I want you to set me straight if you think I'm wrong. I want to know. I mean, I don't know anything, and I am the first one to admit it."

Can't imagine what life is like for two people so deeply in love. Bothering trivialities must have been a treat. Shopping for groceries would not be boring; sweeping the floor would not be tiring; doing laundry would not be bothering. How could a person be so lucky to find the beloved who loves back.