My organized mess

laelene Post in general blog，Tags:
23 March 2009
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A lot of people seem to think that being messy means being disorganized.  What they don’t realize is that there is a method to the madness, if you will.  Sometimes it’s just a matter of how I like to arrange things.  The sad thing is, I’m the only one who knows how to navigate this personal system.  But nevertheless, just because I don’t put things away in compartments, files, folders, and boxes doesn’t mean I don’t have a system.  In fact, I have a very complicated system that involves multiple possible places for things.

You see, that’s the thing about trying to categorize things.  There will always be those things that fit into multiple categories or don’t quite fit into any and just need their own place.  So for people who must segment all things in their lives, that must be a nightmare.  But for someone like me, everything is transitory.  Some things may fall under certain groups when I am feeling a particular way and under other groups when I am feeling another way.  It may not make sense to anyone else at first glance, but I think if someone ever took the time to start to learn the logic I use (however faulty that may be), they can start to understand my system.  It may even seem sensible.

I can be quite picky about how things are organized at times, especially when it comes to stationery and other such office supplies.  I even used to have a sticker drawer that was filled to the brim with sheets of stickers that I have acquired over the years and never bore to use.  I can be quite quirky in how I choose to organize my life, whether it’s sticker drawers or changing methods.  Perhaps the downside of having fluid systems to put things away is the difficulty of tracking down which system I was on when I put certain things away.

There is also something about clutter and mess that makes people think dirty as well.  Maybe there’s a little more surface area on which dust can collect, but really, unless there are flies or ants crawling around, it’s probably not any more noticeable than an area with neat stacks and piles.  Why do we automatically have this negative association with mess?  It’s not necessarily bad!  Well hey, I don’t care; it works for me.  I like my mess.

Random silly ideas

laelene Post in general blog，Tags: ,
22 March 2009
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Today at dinner I was struck my the most fantastical notion of customized menus.  See, when the waitress asked me if it was ok that there is pork in my shrimp wontons, I started to imagine a place where the waitress would ask for any food allergies you may have before you order.  That idea then developed into having electronic menus that would update according to what items you could or could not eat and keep track of your favorite dishes as well as what you ordered recently.  Every first-time customer could then just input their own data and from then on they could be given a membership card to be scanned upon each visit, pulling up their personal data.  Cool, no?  A low-cost version of this could just be printing menus for people with certain nut allergies, seafood allergies, or vegetarian all the way to vegan preferences.

Then, as we were walking along, I thought I heard Marylin say something to me, but she hadn’t uttered a word, which made me think that it would be useful if we glowed or lit up when we talked so it’d be easier to tell if we’re just hallucinating.  She seems to hear me say things a lot when I’m just hanging, though for her this would be less useful, since she tends to be in front of me and not looking at me at the time.  However, for me, this would be a great ability for people to have!  Lol.  Of course, when I told her this, she just looked at me like I was indeed glowing and tried to pretend she didn’t know me as I laughed myself to pieces.  Gosh, I really crack myself up sometimes.  These are the random things I think about when I am happily fed Crystal Jade noodles and xiao long bao.  Yummy.  😛

Money woes

laelene Post in general blog，Tags: ,
21 March 2009
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You know, money can become a major inconvenience when you’re out of the country.  Thankfully, in this day and age it’s rather convenient, what with accounts accessible online, but nonetheless I find it difficult to get things done as efficiently.  With tax season in full swing, I am getting concerned about filing my own tax returns this time around.  There’s a form that I need that I don’t believe I have, but being away makes it difficult for me to ensure I have it in time for the deadline.

Then there’s the issue of bank accounts, which I am considering opening up here, but then I have to figure out how to close it down and withdraw the money at the end of it all.  I’ve thought of just living off cash, but that is too risky and not taking advantage of ways I might be able to make my money work harder for me if I deposited it.  I’ve considered trying to use PayPal, which gives decent rates, or figuring some other way to get my paychecks deposited into something useful.

Let’s not even mention the headache of deciding if keeping my money in SGD or USD is more advantageous.  Ironic that I studied Econ when I rather dislike financial analysis.  Don’t even get me started on stocks, bonds, mutual funds, CDs, IRAs, 401ks, etc… all that talk makes my head spin.  Unfortunately, it is also stuff that I am going to have to get more and more familiar with in the coming years as I try to manage my money effectively.  Sigh.

Bothersome bugs?

laelene Post in general blog，Tags: , , ,
20 March 2009
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Why do people have this aversion to bugs (and amphibians and reptiles)?  Generally they are not going to hurt you and if you just let them be, they will not bother you too.  Yet, it seems that a dislike for these creatures is widespread, from girls who squeal and hide to guys who rush off in a different direction.  Reactions and distaste can range from just avoiding them as much as possible to chasing after them in an attempt to kill them.  But for me, it’s a completely different story.

I know that my own fascination for them stems from my upbringing in the plains of Kansas and interactions with a lot of boys.  When you grow up without being taught to fear or even dislike those critters, but rather play with them and use them as your personal scientific discoveries, it’s hard to want to run from them or kill them.  I remember days on the playground spent thinking of the best ways to catch the grasshoppers that would jump so far, the butterflies that flitted around so high, the praying mantises that would blend into the grass, the spiders that would scuttle so quickly, or the worms that would squirm away into the ground.  I was always so interesting to see all that they could do, from jumping long distances to flying great heights to doing crazy disappearing acts.

Sometimes in my explorations I would accidentally kill the creatures, but eventually I learned how to take care of them and keep them alive.  I even developed a theory that praying mantises will go blind in captivity after one that I was playing with at home developed black eyes that were blind.  I learned how to test he it was blind by slowly moving my finger or a blade of grass towards him.  When he didn’t react as he had done previously, I was quite certain he could not see.  Saddened by this, I took him outside and let him back into the grass, following him around as he moved slowly along the ground.  I don’t know how long this lasted, but at some point, his eyes became clear again!  Then when I tried to get too close, he then scrambled off, probably cursing me in his head, if he’s capable of that.  Look at how educational it can be!

However, there are some bugs that I don’t like either, mostly mosquitoes.  I find them interesting nonetheless, but ultimately annoying with their buzzing and affinity for my blood.  I get a morbid sense of pleasure when I hear them zap in those blue light things that you turn on at night to kill them off.  Yet even with that, I can’t help but be curious about why they make that sound, why they are attracted to the light so much, if it hurts, etc.  Learning about other forms of life make you question all kinds of things about life!  It can be an educational experience if you question all the whys and hows.

These experiences and preferences can work for me in a good or bad sense.  Good in that I am not afraid of them, so I can come in quite useful in getting them out of a room or away from an area, but bad in that I usually don’t want to and can’t kill them, much to my friends’ dismay.  Don’t you find it fascinating that this thing can fly?  Or make silk strands so strong they are virtually indestructible?  Or climb walls or hang around upside down?  Personally, this intrigues me beyond normal curiosity and it gives me a great deal of respect for them.  I think they’re rather cool.

Why look for aliens when you’ve got so many strange life forms in your backyard?

Sounding board

laelene Post in general blog，Tags: ,
19 March 2009
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I spent nearly two hours discussing ideas and philosophies with a coworker today, as he shared with me his thoughts and observations and I expressed some of my own.  Though we see things from very different angles, I respect him as a capable person who is good at what he does.  However, his motivations and mine are vastly different, so the way we approach and think about things is quite unlike the other.

I do find him to be a good sounding board though, and that is why I like to discuss things with him.  When you spend time having to defend yourself and your beliefs, it forces you to reevaluate things and really have good reasons for what you believe.  People who think differently will ask different kinds of questions.  It gives you a chance to examine things so much more thoroughly.

Ultimately, you may come up with many backup plans to try to prevent as many glitches as possible.  It can be quite useful.  Someone may look at the big picture and someone else may look at the little details, or someone may think of the concept while someone else thinks of the logistics.  It’s not always bad to have a foil, though that commonly seems have a bad connotation.  As long as you can learn to work with each other, it can be very effective.

There’s a lot to be learned!

Pervasive American culture

laelene Post in general blog，Tags: , , ,
18 March 2009
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Talk about a powerhouse.  I am constantly surprised at all the speeches that I hear overseas that include references to America this, America that.  I mean, I know that American culture is infecting other countries, but in every area, from social to political to scientific, I am reminded again and again just how effectively this seems to be occurring.  Ok, so they watch American TV dramas and movies, fair enough.  Hollywood is the mecca for the entertainment industry after all.  But must it also be mentioned when referencing research, political philosophies, or economic analyses?  (I’m not talking about the current economy "crisis" here – I can understand how talk of that can stem from the states.)

This happened yesterday at the 30th Annual Speak Mandarin Campaign that I was given the chance to attend.  The Minister Mentor (aka big shot of Singapore) was there as the guest of honor to deliver a speech encouraging Sinagporeans to continue to embrace the Mandarin language and master it as they have English.  In his speech, he referenced some research done in the states and that got me thinking about how I’ve never gone to an event that didn’t mention something from America.  Likewise, even my lectures in England contained US material!  What a strange phenomenon.  Here I thought I was getting away from all that and had to learn to adjust and relearn.

From my perspective, it’s interesting to hear about these issues and listen to what other nations have to say about my "home" country.  Sometimes (actually, a lot of the times), Americans are contained within their little bubble that it’s shocking and eye-opening to see things from another angle, hear another voice.  Though I generally associate myself with the US and think of myself as American (well, Chinese-American), there are times when I feel rather detached from it all.  In the end though, the country has given me a lot of great opportunities and provided a life for my parents and I that would not have been possible anywhere else (as far as I know, anyway).

Whether good or bad, I like to hear news about the states.  I feel more connected to it when it is talked about by non-residents, possibly because I cannot always identify with how they feel.  Everyone seems to have their opinion on the US, from dumbfounded admiration to unbridled disgust.  For me, it’s a matter of this journey of learning more about how the country I grew up in and the culture I grew up with fits into the world.  I tend to be more on the self-righteous side just because I have a certain level of patriotism for the country that may not have been perfect, but certainly has been good to me.

I think a lot of the viewpoints we hold are due to the way we choose to interpret things.  Some people may be offended by things that others find hilarious or just not a big deal.  Meanwhile, others may be greatly affected by things that others don’t pay attention to.  And though I have faced my own challenges and hardships, I am still so much more lucky than most of this world.  Now I do think it’s kind of cool that so many American references are made, but I hope that that is not corrupting the beauty of other cultures.  After all, how boring would the world be with everyone doing things the same way, believing the same ideas, and liking the same things?

When cheese starts to stink

laelene Post in general blog，Tags: , , ,
17 March 2009
0

No, this is not about food.  Rather, it is about a couple that Marylin and I encountered on the bus ride home.  There we were, innocently sitting there on our trek home when a girl plopped down on the seat across from me.  Her boyfriend stood beside her and got dangerously close.  In fact, he was nearly on top of her.  Since I was facing that way, I couldn’t help but notice them from time to time.  That is when my mind started to register the yellow shirts they were wearing.

Now, at first that didn’t seem like a huge deal.  Maybe they just both were in the mood for yellow t-shirts that day.  But then I saw the design on them: matching cartoons.  You know the “Little Miss” characters?  Yeah.  That is what opened my eyes to their black pants.  They were thus deemed the “bumblebee couple” for their color choice.  Well, now that I had noticed a pattern, their matching chain bracelets popped out at me too.  I saw a tattoo on the girl’s hand and even started to scan the guy’s hands for a similar marking.  Thank goodness I didn’t find one, or else I may have been consumed with nausea (partly contributed to by the bus movement).

I don’t mean to judge, but why would you EVER want to match your partner like that?  Unless it’s a costume party or a uniform you two must both wear to school or work, it’s just not cool.  The time and effort spent on that is a sad waste of time that could be much better spent.  If it’s accidental, it can be forgiven once or twice, but a consistent pattern probably points to a serious excess of time.  Is it just us or is that behavior that should never catch on?  I admit, I can be really cheesy sometimes, but even this is too much for me.  You can be cutesy with each other in private all you want, but too much PDA is just disconcerting.

The divergence of languages

laelene Post in general blog，Tags: ,
16 March 2009
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Every now and then I hear a phrase that is so British English that I can’t help but notice.  Today, for some reason, it was "full stop" that caught my attention.  It was just a conversation drifting over my head, one that I was loosely hearing, but not really paying attention to.  I was rather focused on my own work until I heard that term.  Full stop.  Period.  It’s something I would never use, except in the context of making a full stop at a stop sign (which I rarely do, what with the popularity of rolling stops in California).  It is far more comfortable for me to say "period."

This got me thinking about a myriad of other terms that I don’t normally use, like 5er (a five pound note) or alight (get off).  In fact, alight throws me off quite often – for some reason I always think of that as getting on the subway, rather than getting off.  It has always fascinated me, this divergence of language.  Certain terms in certain regions vary greatly, as shown in the classic confusing case of fries (American) versus chips (British) and chips (American) versus crisps (British).  It interested me enough for me to keep an extensive list of everything I came across in my time in England that varied from popular American usage, whether it was a different spelling, different term, or different meaning.

Chinese has diverged even more, with Cantonese and Mandarin being so different verbally that neither can understand the other without training.  How peculiar for a language to split so drastically, yet remain the same (pretty much) in written form.  Granted, there is still a disparity between traditional and simplified forms of writing, but generally they are similar.  What I don’t understand is how this came to be when this was supposed to be a united country that developed these differences.  At least for Spanish, the changes can be seen correlated with geographic locations that are quite far apart.  It makes me wonder how the Chinese government dealt with the different dialects.

Likewise, the romance languages have the same root and Portuguese and Spanish have close ties to each other.  Spanish itself has different forms based on if you are from Europe, North America, or South America.  Now isn’t that something?  That sort of change makes far more sense to me, since the Americas are a world away from Spain and it only natural that it evolved differently.  I can even understand that Mexican Spanish and Argentinian Spanish could have moved in different directions due to the distance.

So why is it that China seems to be the only country with such a strong split?  That’s not even to count the endless list of other dialects that are commonly spoken throughout the country.  Perhaps it has something to do with the billions of people and vast land?  I guess India has seen something like that too, with their host of dialects.  Still, it really puzzles me how a country can stay together when a lot of its people don’t seem to be able to communicate with each other.  I guess it could have worked a long time ago when writing was the most common form of communication to people who didn’t live in your immediate vicinity.  I wonder if that’s why Chinese writing remained a constant but spoken language didn’t.

Hmm.

Motherly affection and devotion

laelene Post in general blog，Tags: , ,
15 March 2009
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You know when your mother loves you when she is willing to fly to a country she has never been to to live with you to help you with your language skills.  o.O  And you know she really sacrifices for you when she’s willing to make time outside of a full-time job to help you translate things.  Sometimes, it still amazes me how much my mom has and would give up for me.

It all started pretty much from birth.  My dad had to leave for the US 6 months before I was born, so she bore the pregnancy herself.  Then, 6 months after that, she had to leave to join my father in Pennsylvania.  She and my father had to work as Research Assistants (and my dad was also a Teaching Assistant) to save up the money to bring me over three years later and support us from there.

From then on, she supported my dad in every move we made, from PA to Kansas to Missouri to New York to California to China again.  Sometime in Kansas she decided that to provide the sort of flexibility in mobility that we would need, she would stop working and be a stay at home mom.  That meant that growing up, I was rather spoiled with the ease of having my forgotten homework delivered to me during the day, being driven to all kinds of activities (mostly sports meets), and having my mother on call for all of my wants and needs.

Starting the day she started staying home, other than the years she went back to China working on a business she started with my dad, I never had to go home to an empty house.  She’d wake up at 4 in the morning to drive me to swim practice, she’d sit around waiting in the car for me every day after school that I had to stay late (back before we had cell phones), she’d trek out to school in the middle of the day to drop off something I needed, and she even came back from China to live with me after I graduated UCLA to keep me company until I started working.

Throughout those years, she has also spent her time managing our finances, making sure we were saving up and investing wisely, laboring over the pains of day trading (thank goodness she gave that up), anticipating my dad and my own needs, finding a balance between giving me what I wanted and what I needed, always supporting my dad with what he needed, cooking, cleaning, and tirelessly devoting herself to being a great mother and an amazing woman.  She did so much behind the scenes that I may never know about, but one of the things I learned a few years ago was that she always carefully planned trips to either be the whole family traveling together, or she and my dad splitting up.  That way, it decreased the odds of both of them getting killed in an accident, leaving me an orphan.

Beyond that, she had great potential to be a highly successful engineer (and potentially, manager) in her own right, but she gave that up to be the cornerstone to her husband and daughter’s success.  Even now she is extraordinarily gifted in that area and could be a great engineer for an aerospace company (which is her dream), but being out of the work force for so long has hindered her aspirations.  She has never complained about what she has given up for us and happily shifted her life to fit our needs.

Now we are all in different countries, though she is based in Beijing with my dad, and she is willing to come to Singapore to stay with me!  I was explaining to her how it seems that people here seem to assume that I know so much of the background for Chinese language and culture just because I have a very standard accent and sound quite like a native, but I essentially grew up American, so much of that knowledge is lost on me.  I am concerned about my reading and writing skills in Mandarin that I may need to use for an upcoming project, so she suggested she come so she can be here with me and help me.  Of course, she’s still got her own work to do, so that would be a lot of time out of her day to help me improve my Chinese.

To her it may seem like a small gesture, but to me it really speaks volumes for her deep commitment to me, my future, and my success.  It really meant a lot to me.  I’m learning to appreciate her more and more.  A few years ago, I probably would have thought it was normal and nothing special.  That’s just how much she has conditioned me to her support.  So I hope she doesn’t feel under appreciated, because she isn’t.

Divergence

laelene Post in general blog，Tags: ,
14 March 2009
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I just talked to Elle and she got the Teach for America offer!  Now it’s time to spend the next week deciding if she wants to go for it.  Though she worked really hard for it and is leaning towards that path, you never with these things.  It is a big decision for her life, after all, since it will take over the next two years of her life and take her out to Louisiana.

At this point in our lives, a lot of what we’re going through is all about growing apart.  If she chooses to go through with this, my best friends and I will be spread out between states in the Midwest, South, and West Coast.  Even if she doesn’t go for this, she is interested in moving to D.C., so we’d still be in three very different regions of the country.  This is also assuming that I will make it back to the states by then!

Today I went to a workshop on facilitation and how the International Association of Facilitators emphasizes process-driven versus content-driven facilitation.  Basically what that means that going in as a facilitator, you are not a consultant who provides advice.  Instead you stay neutral and just ask the right questions to get people in the group to talk about the right things for the purposes of that discussion.

The issue of divergence was brought up as a concept for how these sessions work; first you brainstorm and get the contributions from individuals, which is the diverging component.  After you all those little pieces, you parse through and converge again at a point where the group reaches a consensus on the answer or solution they were looking for.  I found this an interesting way of wording it that I had not encountered before.

Oh the parallels in life.

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