Since I have to pay a lot to learn....

Major props to whoever made this video.

Anonymous

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if I was to write this blog as an anonymous person. I could say whatever the heck I want and not worry about others who may read my blog would think.

A Fun Story

I thought I share this story from my private blog. I really like this story and it made me think about the hardships I faced this past year and this current year...hopefully it can have the same affect on others as it has had on me. :)

FOOTPRINTS
One night I dreamed I was walking
Along the beach with the Lord,
Many scenes from my life flashed across the sky.
In each scene I noticed footprints in the sand.
Sometimes there were two sets of footprints.
Other times there was only one.
This bothered me because I noticed
During the low periods of my life when I was
Suffering from anguish, sorrow or defeat,
I could see only one set of footprints.
So I said to the Lord, You promised me,
Lord, that if I followed you,
You would walk with me always.
But I noticed during the most trying periods
Of my life there has only been
One set of prints in the sand.
Why, when I needed you most,
Have you not been there for me?
The Lord replied,
The times when you have seen only one set of footprints
It was then that I carried you. -By Anon

I Don't Want to Grow Up

I'm starting to feel the consequences of growing up and I kind of dislike it a lot. All these bill for things that I didn't even know that I had to pay for, I need to start planning for my future, realizing that there is such thing as an easy life, etc. This past week for me and people around me has been a downer. I had three midterms in a span of two days and I believed I did really on all those tests only to find out that I hit the mean. It really sucks because it makes me wonder if I am really no better than average. Each year I have tried to study harder yet my grades has yet to show any kind of improvement. Those midterms are only part of the puzzle that contributed a pretty negative week. Today I found out that my roommates and I were ripped off because our T.V. broke today and the repairman said the problem has been there for a while but the guy who sold it to us said it was perfectly fine. Today I found out that someone I knew passed away. There a bunch of other things that went wrong this week but I’ll just start ranting about how much I hate certain things.

All these events really make start looking at where I am in life and I realized I need to really evaluate where I stand and start making decisions that will affect me for the rest of my life. I've been living my life so far carefree with the belief that good things will happen as long as I try. However, my wake-up call has not been pleasant and it's somewhat depressing. I'm watching people I know graduate college and start the careers and some friends I know are developing relationship into something that will most likely end up in marriage. It's funny that when I was little all I wanted to is grow up, but now here I am on brink of "growing up" and I don't want to. I think it is because I'm afraid what lies for me in the future.

I was told that I'll grow up and do great things, but what if those things don't happen? What if I am just average? To be honest, I really don't know what my talents are. I'm not the most athletic guy, I'm not the smartest guy, nor am I artistic. Heck, I have the most rotten luck with girls. So where does that put me? I honestly have no clue, people say that I am capable of great things but can I truly tap into that "potential" and do those "great things?" So far academically, it seems that no matter how hard I try, I will always hit that wall that prevents me from performing well. There seems to be a wall for just about everything I attempt to be good at which really makes me wonder what am I supposed to be good at if everything I do ends up with me either being mediocre or failing. Before I used to be able to live my life carefree, but now I am very afraid of what lies next for me because the days of my youth are coming to an end and I really need to evaluate my life and figure out what I need to do with the rest of my life.

I want to go to Disneyland...it's so happy there.

What If...

Today was a pretty uneventful day for me. I was pretty much alone in my house all day today with absolutely nothing to do, yet I felt like today I did a lot more thinking than any other day. And I caught myself going into a bunch of "what if" scenarios.

I recently got into a pretty bad car accident a few days ago. Luckily no one was seriously injured and the worst thing that may come out of this accident is I may lose my car due to it being totaled. I thought I would be able to move on from that experience and learn from my mistakes yet I caught myself today thinking "what if I had seen that car earlier and stopped sooner?" This eventually lead into me wondering "what if..." for almost every major landmark event in my life. Just thinking about what my life would be like had I taken a different route at each of these moments made me curious what I would be like today. One thing that I was thinking about a lot today was what I would be like had I not staffed SPOP last summer. Would I discovered my passion for dancing? Would I still have met the people I met through SPOP? Would I have the same outlook about life? There are many more questions that were raised but as I was thinking about that I realize I was venturing down a path that I shouldn't explore. All this "what if..." was making me look at my past and either regret past decisions/actions or wonder had I made the correct decision at that moment. I was forcing myself to start thinking backwards instead of forward.

I'm not saying that thinking about the past is a terrible thing to do, but if we are not careful we will begin to dwell on the past which is pretty much what I began to do. Yes, I do wish I could create a time machine and go back and prevent/fix all of my experiences that I would label as bad experiences. Yet, if I was to fix those things where would I learn the lessons those experiences provided? There are so many things in life that cannot be taught and must be experienced first hand. Living in the past would get me nowhere because all I would be doing is moping around complaining about things I could of done differently. It would simply ruin my future. Life is best experience without any regrets, so I guess it's best to accept everything that happened, soak in the lessons and keep moving forward without looking back.

Carpe Diem.

Food for Thoughts

I want to be able to talk like this.



I had to post this one too...



Where are your monsters?

Because I'm Asian

Throughout my travels, I have encountered one thing repeatedly that I have never experienced before in the United States. I have never really experienced the kind of stereotyping that I have received here. I have a whole list of times where I experience some random person saying something that is somewhat derogatory. Some of the things that happened to me are;

-I was walking around town in the early afternoon with a friend, who is Chinese too, when a bunch of kids (looked like they were still high school) walked right at us and started shouting some random "ching-chong" gibberish because I wouldn't move out of "their way.
-I was waiting at a bus stop late at night and a group of tourist came up to me but I heard one of them say "Let's not ask him, he probably doesn't know English."
-My friends and I was approached by some girl in front of a pub and was asked if hello was "Konichiwa or nee hao ma." When we told her they both mean hello in two different languages, she ran back to her friends shouting "They speak perfect English!" She later returned and asked us if we were from China or Japan. We really tempted to say we're from Laos.
-I was actually asked if being called a Chink was ok. This was the most ridiculous of all my experiences.

There are a few more moments but there all pretty similar to those experience. I experience a lot of "Wow, your English is really good" moments. I find it really interesting that I'm experiencing these kind of moments now rather than in America. I suspect it's because Asians are a rare sight here in Brighton as compared to where I'm from.

These experiences now make me wonder one thing. Why are people here so misconceited about Asians here? Maybe I'm just on the bad end of the stick but more than one experience with this kind of stuff is making me believe that there is something wrong here. In my own personal opinion, I think it's because people are curious at the same time they are not as educated as they think they are about our cultures. So far, most people here only believe that there are only Chinese and Japanese and every other ethnicities fall into some sub-category of Chinese and Japanese. It makes me wonder why they haven't realized that there are more than just two ethnicities and there is in fact a large number of different ethnicities each with their own unique language and culture. Perhaps I can blame it on the lack of diversity which is very evident in some parts of town.

In the end, I still don't know why I am so heavily stereotyped but hopefully at the end of the trip I'll learn something about that.