Blame it on an irresponsible bug that wants another thing I haven't done before, i.e. something totally American, blow-all and beachy, that cuts into NY promises. I have just run out of printer paper again and it's only the third week of school; went to buy cake ingredients for Cecil's birthday and lost the butter on the way home; then decided that if I swear and teeth-chatter every time the temperature drops below zero in the daytime (the wind really squeezes your head like a lemon), it isn't the brightest thing to apply to Oxford for exchange, especially not in the fall semester.

I never knew that Amnesty International's stand on the death penalty is that it shouldn't exist at all. Or that a mere 22 countries carried out executions in 2005. I was seriously shocked when the president insisted that providing a for stand for the death penalty would be the same thing as saying there is an argument for genocide. Extremism can take many forms, and I always disconcertedly realise I'm that much more conservative than I thought I was.
On top of the usual I'm now on praise team with practices at least twice a week and start gainful employment at the bookstore on Wednesday. Fun times.

I gave Alice a 学业进步 CNY pennant and she's incongruously hung it on her door next to the Johnny Depp and New Zealand posters. Also, there are six SMU exchange students this spring and two girls are on my floor, one of who turned out to be an ex-primary school classmate; it was so funny when Erin invited me over to their room to say hi and I saw Cheryl and we gaped at each other for about five minutes, then started swapping food in typical S'pore fashion. I'm typing exhausted. If you're interested I'm taking the following courses this semester and for the first time don't feel the need to "class-shop", since I've already pre-thought my academic life so well:
- Victorian Poetry
- Shakespeare I (My professor summed up the reasons for the course most beautifully, after word-perfect reciting Macbeth's key soliloquy at us: "He could have said, 'Life's a bitch and then you die. He didn't.")
- Elements of Ecology
- Intro to Media Studies
- Modern Japanese Women Writers
Learnt today that a) blue hair colouring is probably impossible to find in Charlottesville, especially if your only resource is strip mall drugstores and marts, b) that I click alarmingly well with Brown residents. My guitar's travelled back with me this time, strapped into two plane seats on the flight to Tokyo; am also wrangling with social security numbers and bank accounts cos I'm trying to get a job at the university bookstore. And truth - that people are amazing - makes it easier to fall in love with every little piece.
I just realised I've been at UVA almost as long as I was at RJ. Shit, how scary is that. But life is full.

There's always the disorienting desire to 大哭一场 before leaving - not purely out of miss-everyone sadness but also only understanding a fraction of the enormity of lives to juggle - but it never happens. Maybe it's the complete inability to understand why some people can so freely inflict emotions on others who can only awkwardly try to comprehend. While it's a new idea to remember "there is nothing I don't treasure", wouldn't that mean heavily weighting every item without assigning responsibility to anyone but myself? As I knew from the beginning it's a fairly dangerous way to live, but that's really the whole point and the whole story.
It's more than a bit painful to look at entries from a year ago and already realise the never-to-come-again innocent happiness I had. But more importantly, this time I've dared to sacrifice for the juggling. And as always the balance.

Twice in a single sentence

My mother unearthed a letter from a very early part of our history that contained pictures.

While the photos are light and grainy you can tell one girl is wearing pink and the other blue in the first picture and since I always wore pink I should be the one in the white heels but quite honestly if she was turned the right way round I really wouldn't be able to tell. It's quite obvious who's who in the second picture though because only my sister would have that kind of evil, scrunched-up expression on her face. I think I just alternated between smiling and looking scared.
And written on the back of the pictures: "Ning and Han, I love you. Love, Auntie Aida." I don't remember being able to induce that kind of love. But seventeen years ago it was all very clean and simple. 2006 was a mad-ass year in at least ten ways. Borat said something like "Shit times, good times, but mostly... shit times." Fortunately, Borat does not speak for me. Awkwardness, inertia, cynicism, lost friends, new friends, old friends, paper-crashes, but mostly learning the importance of

- being patient and humble
- discovering things on my own
- expecting anything

I think it is best to have coherent resolutions.