When I eat foods, the most important factor tends to be the texture of the dish rather than its taste.  That’s why I don’t eat calamari and why I love soup.  I’ll go for almost anything if it’s moist!  It’s very rare that I would like a dry dish with no sauce, so soup is generally a safe bet, since it has to have some liquid content at least.  I don’t know if other people care as much (I doubt it) and I think that usually people care more about the taste of their food.  However, it doesn’t work that way for me and I’d rather have a tasteless dish that wasn’t dry than a really flavorful dish that left me with cottonmouth.

For the most part, this isn’t really an issue – I love things that are smooth, crispy, crunchy, or any variety of textures as long as it’s not rubbery.  Something about the elasticity of a food (usually seafood) just doesn’t appeal to me at all.  Luckily, most things aren’t like that.  As for dishes that are very dry, I’ll still eat them if I have plenty of water.  I can’t stand it if I don’t get enough liquids to mask the dryness, which is why hot chocolate and tea are my friends when it comes to cookies and crackers.  Maybe my body’s trying to tell me that I’m not hydrated enough?

Whatever it is, I’m always looking for a place with great soup or noodle soup.  Yummm…

I’ve never been a fan of cold drinks, though I have enjoyed some here and there.  Usually iced drinks are too cold for me, so I opt for room temperature or even hot water.  Luckily, this seems to be a growing trend and I no longer get the raised eyebrow when I ask for hot water at a restaurant.  I’m glad that my beverage choice is something that more people are adopting, especially since it’s probably easier on your body.

I remember reading once that contrary to popular belief, ice water is not more thirst-quenching.  In fact, it said that warm water is the best for absorption and therefore more thrist-quenching.  However, through media portrayals, it seems we have learned that only cold drinks can satisfy our needs after a strenuous workout or on a hot day.  I think that cold water feels refreshing and it wakens you a bit, which gives the impression that it is better when you’re thirsty.  In addition, if you’ve built up a lot of heat from working out or are already too hot from the weather, you want to feel the coolness of the drink to help lower your temperature.

Still, I usually prefer at least room temperature water in those situations when my body is hotter than it would like to be.  I find that cold drinks numb my mouth and freeze up my insides, which isn’t comfortable at all!  I’ve always been sensitive to temperature changes, so when it gets cold or I cool down too much, my stomach and intestines throw a fit.  Perhaps that’s the real reason why I avoid really cold drinks.  Who wants to have a stomachache after they drink a cup of water?

Anyways, this whole cold drink popularity thing has always baffled me, since it’s not really the same in Chinese culture.  I don’t think the Chinese would have iced their drinks if it weren’t for Western influences.  Whatever makes cold drinks so appealing just isn’t worth it to me.  I’ll take the drink in the box over the one in the cooler any day.  And watch me quench my thirst better.  ;)

My wisdom teeth started to bother me today and now the back of my mouth is sore.  I think it was because I decided I wasn’t brushing well enough back there so I gave them a good scrub.  They definitely weren’t used to all that action and I think my gums got inflamed.  I’ve been holding off getting them pulled because it’ll cost a pretty penny, but I’m really getting tired of the crowded feeling I have in my mouth.

Back in China, I was going to have them removed, but then I changed my mind when I realized I might not get to enjoy the food there if I went through with it.  I thought it’d take a week or so to recover, but as I later found out from my parents, it could have been fine after a day or two.  Oh well, it’s too late for that now!  Unfortunately they’re bothering me these days, so I really want to get them out.  I’ll have to review my coverage and see if it’s worth it right now.

I’m very tempted to find something to prop my jaw to help ease the tension, but what is there?  I tried using gum for awhile and also putting food on that side of my mouth to chew so I couldn’t accidentally bite my cheek.  Those solutions proved too temporary for my needs.  Maybe a night’s sleep will reduce the swelling and make me forgetting about those annoying buggers.  Why didn’t I have them removed long ago??  I’m regretting that now.  :(

It didn’t even occur to me it was Friday the 13th until a guy at work said it today.  The number thirteen has actually been my favorite number since fifth grade, when we had numbered cubbyholes and I was #13.  My second favorite number is 19 because that was the box that the guy I liked had!  Haha, funny how some things really last in your life.

Well, since it was a day of superstition for much of this country, I thought I’d share a video of one of my cats.  When I was choosing them this summer, I specifically went for the dark ones because they don’t seem to get adopted as much.  I now have a gray and a black cat, both with some white accents.  I don’t know why cats get a bad rap, especially black ones, but at least they are lucky and respected in some cultures.  In this video, Missy (the gray one) was really enjoying the tag on my new Victoria’s Secret shirt.  She’s a curious and playful one!

Yesterday was the deadline to apply to Stanford’s Graduate School of Business in the second round (there are three rounds and year and you can apply in any single one you choose).  This entire week, I had been working to perfect everything for my application, particularly my essays.  I had found the Harvard Business School essays to be easier to tackle, with only a few rewrites.  When it came to Stanford’s though, I was a mess.  Let’s take a look at both schools’ prompts:

HBS

1. Tell us about three of your accomplishments.
2. Tell us three setbacks you have faced.
3. Why do you want an MBA?
4. Answer a question you wish we had asked.

Stanford GSB

1. What matters most to you, and why?
2. What do you want to do – REALLY – and why Stanford?
3. Tell us about a time when you made a lasting impact on your organization.
4. Tell us about a time when you generated support from others for an idea or initiative.

I felt like Harvard’s were more practical and Stanford’s were more emotional, if that makes sense.  What made Stanford’s challenging for me was how personal those first two are.  It was really getting to the core of what is meaningful to me and it’s hard to express something you believe in so deeply.  I had to work backwards, first sharing stories of my workplace successes, then tackling what I want to do and what matters to me.

The first versions of my responses to questions 1 and 2 came out extremely idealistic.  I realized that I sounded like my mind was in the clouds and my feet weren’t on the ground.  I knew I had to present things in a more concrete manner so the selection committee could see the logic behind how what mattered to me drove what I wanted to do and why that all tied into going to business school.  Unfortunately, I cared so much about properly expressing something so close to my heart that nothing sounded right.  I would write a paragraph and start the next only to decide that I wanted to add a paragraph to the beginning instead.  I labored over those two for so long!

Finally, I was satisfied with how the second essay came out, but I was still pretty stumped by the first.  How do you share your greatest dreams without sounding unrealistic?  Again and again, I would rewrite my response to that question until I started to create a structure that made sense.  I then made the very smart move of sending my writing to Maven for a proofread.  One of my greatest challenges in writing essays is making everything flow.  I tend to let my ideas out stream-of-consciousness style, which usually results in random connections and scattered ideas.  He was able to help me reorder some of my sentences to make my structure infinitely better!  At that point, I was finally ready to turn everything in.  I had put forth a great effort and now it was time to officially apply to one of the most prestigious programs in the world.

I feel so relieved now that it’s in and strangely, I’m not really nervous about decision day.  That’s probably just because it’s still over two months away!  As the time nears, I’m sure I will nervously anticipate the news and hope for the best.  I can really see myself going to a top business school and excelling.

Oh what a marvelous thing has happened!  It has been years since I started developing and talking about my business philosophy, one of the key components of which is a business partner.  Finally, I have stumbled across the first viable lead and I am thrilled!  I’ll call him Maven, since that’s what he is as per Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point.  Maven and I both have a strong interest in business and our conversation recently led us to budding partnership.  He has a fantastic idea for a business and I have all the eagerness and complementary skills that he could ask for.

I feel like it’s been a long time coming, so it’s really rewarding to find someone who has a vast number of skills that I don’t, and who needs the very skills that I do have.  At the same time, we share many values and both believe in the synergy that can be created to make a partnership more than just 1 +1.  It’s just enough overlap to agree on the important things, and plenty of complementary abilities to pack a powerful punch.  I couldn’t have imagined a more perfect scenario!  If nothing else, 2011 will go down in history as the year I met Maven.  A very fortunate experience indeed!

Whether or not we are able to get this idea off the ground (and I am confident that we can and will), I have a great feeling about just knowing Maven.  There’s a lot to learn from him and he is a fantastic conversationalist!  I’d been craving the kinds of discussions we’ve been having – about business, personal philosophies, psychology, and so many other topics.  We’re both very curious, inquisitive folks who think a lot, ask a lot, wonder a lot.  I’ve never had someone ask me so many “whys” about my beliefs and it really helps me understand myself better.

In addition, I got a kick out of the fascination we both seem to have with personality tests and what can be gleaned from them.  I love reading personality profiles!  I feel like I learned a lot about him when I read the description of his “type,” whether or not all of it was accurate.  At least it gave me a good basis for understanding the type of person he is.  The more I get to know, the better it all seems.  With our work ethics, determination, and combined efforts, I wouldn’t put anything past us.  You just wait!

So many of my friends have a group from college, or even high school, that they still keep in touch with and hang out with.  A good portion of them also have some friends stemming from childhood as well.  I wonder what that’s like and if I’ll ever have lifelong friends.  The landscape of my life is so variable that dozens of friends have come and gone.  The people I spend much of my time with are only friends I’ve met in the past three years or so.  I’m so used to moving around and making new friends that it’s hard to imagine knowing someone for that long.

I’ve always hoped that each friendship would be one that would last forever, but as our lives changed, we would grow apart.  It also didn’t help that I moved a lot, so many friendships dwindled after not being able to hang out for a long period.  The internet has definitely helped to slow down the process of losing touch, but it still happens.  At this point, the only person in my life right now who I know will be around for decades is Panda.  He’s the best friend I’ve got and anyone else could very well be out of the picture in a few years.

I haven’t given up hope that I can maintain some long-lasting friendships though!  I think that business school will offer me a great chance to meet people who I can consider friends forever.  In addition, any and all future business partners will probably be great friends and a common interest in our business should keep us in contact for a long time to come.  I wish I had a group of close friends who all hung out with each other, but that’s just not the way my life developed.  Instead, I will continue to be a connector, bringing together my different sets of friends for gatherings and potentially facilitating some wonderful new bonds.

I was writing an email recently and wanted to indicate the possessive of Charles.  I vaguely remember being taught that it should be Charles’ with no extra “s” but since then I had read styling guides that said technically it should be Charles’s, though really either is acceptable.  To some people, Charles’s may seem wrong, but it is not.  For the sake of not confusing people, I tend to use Charles’ since I know that was commonly taught in schools across the nation.  However, I much prefer using Charles’s; if it weren’t for the fact that some people were never taught that was correct, I’d use it more often.  After all, who wants to go into a grammar/punctuation lesson in the middle of an email exchange?

I actually did do that in this case, but only because the thread included very bright people who probably knew exactly what I was talking about and maybe even experienced the same hesitation using Charles’s vs. Charles’.  I was happy to have that feeling validated when one of the girls replied confirming my statement and offering a source that explains the use of apostrophes: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/apostrophe (This site is also a great source for other interesting, entertaining, and information infographic cartoons.

This incident gave me confidence to go forth using Charles’s from now on.  Who cares if other people think I’m wrong and don’t know the rules of English?  Those who really know what they’re talking about will know the truth.  ;-P

I spent the entire day watching episodes of Charmed and boy have I learned my lesson!  It’s no good to sit/lay in front of a screen for that long, especially not when you’re watching the screen at all different angles.  I’m sure it would have been better if I was sitting properly, but I would lay on my side, my belly, even my back to watch.  Now I’ve got this terrible headache so it’s time to stop viewing any screen and rest my eyes.

This harkens back to the days when I would binge on episodes of Princess Pearl, a popular Chinese drama from over a decade ago.  At least I watched those on a TV screen, so wasn’t so close and didn’t lay on the floor.  Still, I would wrap myself up in a blanket and surround myself with food much as I did yesterday.  It’s not the best way to pass a day and I’m looking forward to spending some time outside tomorrow, breathing fresh air and enjoying natural light.

I attended the Oppenheim lecture tonight, about green chemistry.  It’s a growing sector that is coming up with innovations that are not only environmentally safe and sustainable for the long term, they work better and make more sense for the bottom line as well.  While there are definitely plenty of “green” products that cost a premium, it doesn’t have to be that way.  As our economy and society demand better, companies will respond with great new solutions to consumer needs.

Many of the solutions that Dr. Paul Anastas, the main speaker, pointed out were rooted in bio-mimicry.  It’s a topic I’m fascinated with, since most (if not all) of the solutions we search for are already present in nature.  For example, he told us of the pain of trying to redo a bathroom because of all the hardened glue you have to scrape away.  It’s tedious and can be quite toxic too.  Instead, we can learn from mussels, which very strongly adhere themselves to rocks and other things just as well, but need no dangerous chemicals to do so.  By learning from the multitude of creatures in the world around us, we can find brilliant, simple, yet effective ways of solving many of our issues.

In addition, Dr. Anastas pointed out that we really have to allow disruptive inventions to come along.  It’s not good enough to just improve some of the products we have now; we have to be willing to adopt a method that could completely upheave the way we’re used to doing things.  Once upon a time any city would have telephone wires running overhead all over the place.  Nowadays that becomes more and more unnecessary as we shift towards wireless signal towers.  In the case of detergents, it is becoming a very real possibility that we could have self-cleaning clothes, which would wipe out the need for detergents!  Or, when creating clothes, rather than using dyes that could be harmful, they are now experimenting with growing cotton that in itself already has color.  It’s a willingness to completely rethink our approach to common issues that can lead to wonderfully disruptive changes to our lives and our way of life.

He also made sure to emphasize the fact that a company’s bottom line does not have to suffer for the sake of these new methods.  In fact, these can be built into very lucrative businesses.  What he said rang so true to what I’ve been learning from Opportunity Green as well: sustainability and environmental responsibility and very much in line with profitability, and not just because you’d have a green image.  In fact, if you don’t even consider the environmental impact, so many of these solutions are just plain superior as is.  Why wouldn’t you go with them?  I think a lot of sustainability and the green movement has been misunderstood.  People still think that to be eco-friendly is to be pricier.  We need more companies out there to show people that this isn’t the case so that the general population can start adopting products that are better for us all – people, the environment, the world.

I’m hoping that part of my impact in the future will be along these lines.  To break people away from the prejudices and misguided opinions of what it takes to be good to our environment.  To show them that they can save money, save the environment, and make our world a better place all at the same time.  It’s about time more light be shed on the beauty of green choices!