♥ M y P e t i t e L i f e

♥ Sunday, February 07, 2010

My Petite Life ♥

This does not feel like the 2nd week of school

SO. MUCH. WORK.

I'm starting to understand why upperclassmen don't seem to go out as often as we do. It's simply impossible. It's only the second week of the semester and i'm UP TO MY EARS in work, overdue work, and impending work. And you know what i do when i have shitload of work to do, I sleep a lot and eat a whole lot just to avoid having to think about work. Jeez. It's unhealthy on so many levels. Besides, it's too fucking cold in this town. Who can live in 10 degrees sub zero weather for three months? Not me, that's for damn sure.

Half a year from now, I can see myself holed up in my room (IN ONE OF THE RIVER HOUSES THAT IS NOT DUNSTER OR MATHER, please God!) on a Friday night, looking out the window at the drunken freshmen tripping all over themselves in the courtyard, and feeling kind of sorry for them.

Yeah. Who am i kidding? I can't.

♥ Michelle: Auf Wiedersehen!

2/07/2010 04:27:00 AM

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♥ Friday, January 01, 2010

My Petite Life ♥

A New Beginning

If what they say about New Year's Day being indicative of how your year is going to go is true, then mine surely involves a lot of sleeping. Woke up at 10AM today, went to sleep again at 3PM and just woke up again at 6, just in time for dinner. Boy, i do love doing nothing :)

Here's to celebrate a new year, and a new beginning! I've given up on new year resolutions because we all know they never happen. Case in point: It's been a tradition that i put "losing weight" as one of mine in all five previous years. I now resort to making monthly, weekly, even daily resolutions. There are many more of them, hence the probability of at least one or, God willing, some being carried out is greater.

Happy New Year! 新年おめでとうございます｡ Prosit Neujahr! Chúc mừng năm mới! Yayy :D

That would be the extend of my foreign language arsenal. No actually Japanese (what little of it i learned after two years in Singapore) is fast falling out of grasp and German is still at its very vulnerable formative stage. Evidence: I just googled "Happy New Year German" because it has yet been taught to us in class. Or maybe it has, in one of those (regrettably many) days when i was absent. I'll never know.

What i look forward to next week:

1) Finally getting on that treadmill and lose the many many pounds i've gained after a mere four months at college.

2) More dress shopping for freshman formal. I have decided to try and look smashing for my best girl friends, my dearest gay friends and myself (nothing like celebrating your proud singledom in an event filled with couples, 90% of which won't last longer than the layers of snow covering the Yard), though with the weight gain and (presumably) weather-related breakout it's looking more like mission impossible with each passing day. And you know i do love shopping. The perfectly reasonable occasion to justify it is just icing on the cake.

3) More soccer watching. I've missed sitting in front of a huge tv screen and cheering for Manchester United. Maybe 25% cheering and 75% cursing at the stupid referee/midfielder of the other team/missed opportunities. Hot athletes running after a ball (the metaphor!) and an opportunity to be foul-mouthed sans judgment. Who would not embrace such a merry event? Certainly not me.

4) More restaurants-hopping in Hanoi. The food here is gooooood. And cheap. It's heaven for the fat and the culinary connoisseur really. The only beef i find is that there's a very good chance you end up with a bad case of food poisoning afterwards. Besides, you've got to be willing to "kiss" a lot of frogs (and possibly get stomachaches) before finding that one perfect little restaurant in an obscure corner of this city. So far we've had Thai, randomly-themed BBQ, Japanese and many cocktails. I've almost forgot what good alcohol tastes like. Almost. Fortunately. I'm looking forward to more Thai, BBQ, Japanese and cocktails. Life's going great. Weight loss plan isn't.

5) More hanging out with the little sis and the folks. My dad's reminding me why i have an alcohol abuse problem with, thankfully, no Asian glow, and why possibly no guy is ever good enough. Mom's reminding me why i go away often, and my 5'8" 15-year-old baby sister is like an added flavor of Harvard, with all its sky scrapping people.

What i look forward to this month:

1) The City of Angels. Ricardo Medina. Confirmed. Yipeeeeee!

2) 10-hour shopping/culinary spree in Tokyo during layover. Hopefully.

3) Finding the perfect dress for Formal. With the perfect handbag and the perfect shoes. Can you imagine if my dad's drunk enough to consent to funding the whole ensemble?

4) Harvard. Freshman Spring. Partying. Drama. Fun.

What i'm not looking forward to:

1) Harvard. Freshman Spring. Snow. Lots and lots of snow. The 21 age limit. Partying gone haywire. Drama. Lots and lots of drama.

I'm working on that post on the college application essay. That's a lie, i've been thinking - excessively - about starting on that post, now that i've read many essays this application season, the 'applying' portion of which has pretty much wrapped. I will write it. Some day. Soon.

To all of you nervous college-hopefuls out there: Quit worrying and start enjoying what's left of your high school life or your post-A level vacation! You probably will never have a well-justified, uninterrupted 8 month break to do whatever you choose ever again in your life (i actually hope you won't), so live it! The cliche goes, "Live a little. Love a little." So do that, ok? And things will fall into place. Come August, you'll go where you're supposed to and life will continue running its course. A few years (or months) down the road you'll look back and see all this fretting and obsessing for what it really is - silly, unnecessary stress. So go out, live, get hurt, and move on :)

♥ Michelle: Auf Wiedersehen!

1/01/2010 06:02:00 PM

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♥ Saturday, December 26, 2009

My Petite Life ♥

The city of lonely people

This is going to be one of those gloomy posts since I just had a huge fight with my mom about something trivial. In fact, I can’t even remember why we fought. It’s just a sort of biannual ritual we have, much like political strife in Thailand or a flu pandemic.

A dear friend of mine once commented that in a place that is constantly changing and moving, the only 'constant' seems to be solitude. She saw many groups of friends walking around together. She saw couples of friends. But mostly, she saw people walking alone. The excuse commonly used by Harvard students is the lack of time, which is true. We bounce from place to place, from people to people. We don’t even have time to sleep, eat, or finish that paper due 2 days ago, let alone build and sustain a relationship that would probably not last beyond two months. And even if it does, at some point you’re going to graduate from this gated haven, and then nobody can even tell where in the world you will be.

The saying goes, “It’s lonely at the top”, and if the conventional wisdom that most Harvard students are at the top of their game, be it academics, sporting or anything else, proves true, then it inevitably follows that we are some of the loneliest people in the world.

I must admit, I’m an avid reader of ISawYouHarvard.com, a part-stalkerish, part-sad and part-sweet website devoted to the sightings of fellow Harvard students, to record and reconnect “missed connections” and, essentially, to confess your, mostly one-sided, crushes. Sometimes the posts are just downright creepy, like “I saw you… from my desk in Widener library. You were dancing around in your room in black leggings.” (Seriously dude?) Most of the times, though, they’re just sad stories of unrequited feelings you know exist, but never expect to be so ubiquitous. “I saw you… walking in the Yard. I’ve loved you since freshman year.” People say websites like these just prove that Harvard students are a sexually frustrated bunch, an observation that certainly has some truth to it, but might not be entirely fair. We are not frustrated so much as afraid. My theory is that it is doubly hard for us to confess our feelings precisely because we are Harvard students. Rejection seems even scarier to us because, let’s be honest, we haven’t had much brushes against them our entire life. It’s an uncharted territory. It’s filled with tears, pain and regrets, something we’re not used to. So we left our feelings unspoken, unheard, and when the object of our affection is happily attached to someone else, we stare at our reflections in the mirror, shrug our shoulders and sigh, “It was never meant to be anyway.” We are supposed to be go-getters. We go after what we want and we usually get it. Yet, in an area of life called “relationship,” we falter. Guess it’s true, nobody can have it all.

Maybe ignorance really is bliss. Maybe it’s better not to know that your crushes have crushes on other people, or are jerks who tell you anything just to get you into bed with them. Maybe it’s infinitely better not to know you have crushes on them in the very first place.

I’m not a relationship person. I like it logical, rational, black and white. I don’t even like surprises because the unknowns scare me. I’m somewhat of a control freak. Okay so that’s an understatement. I am a control freak. I want to know exactly what I’m doing and how I’m going to achieve my goals. Yet, I’m also fickle and about as unpredictable as the Cantabrigian weather. And “relationship”, with all the messy notions of feelings and emotions, just doesn’t go well with who I am. I can't commit. Not to any one clothing store or any one flavor of ice cream, and definitely not to any one guy. I'm not an emotional person. I don't ask people five times a day how they're feeling. I can't even remember the last time I cried. I'm positive it wasn't this year. All these "feelings" talks make me squirmy and uncomfortable. I’m also a cynic who doesn’t believe in love. I don’t like fairytales, nor have I read or watched much of it at all since I was a little kid. All these images of the happy couples riding off into the sunset are pretty much deceptive bullshit as far as I’m concerned. “Everlasting love?” Please, doesn’t exist. And if relationships won’t last, why should I bother at all? The heartaches, the pain, the hours lost moping over a failed relationship just seem too high a price to pay for something that is based on misleading euphoria, false promises and delusion, and hence destined to be short-lived.

Ultimately, though, I wonder if it’s all because I don’t want to set myself up to get hurt. If you’re not someone’s girlfriend, then you can never be someone’s ex-girlfriend. Of all the relationships you put yourself through in a lifetime, you’re lucky if one works out. And even if it does, who can guarantee that it will still do a couple years, or even months, down the road. Love, like marriage, is but a social construct. Society places pressure on you, especially if you’re a girl, to “settle down!”, “get married!”, and as you feel the clock ticking away, you force yourself on some guy you’re “possibly” in love with and hope for the best. I’m not sure I ever want to subject myself to all that. Why hang on to some false promises when you can be fabulous and fabulously single? ♥

I was told on various occasions i think and act like a guy when it comes to relationship. The funny thing is, while it's an accepted fact that most guys only look for hookups whether they say it in so many words, the same is not true for girls even though we state it outright. While many girls say, "I'm not looking for a relationship", few are believed. Guys often interpret our words as: "I'm not looking for a relationship... unless it's with you," or "...until you came along." Truth be told, some girls really just wanna have fun ;)

“Maybe some women aren't meant to be tamed. Maybe they just need to run free til they find someone just as wild to run with them.”

Maybe it’s true. Maybe if our lives were to mirror those lived in the six seasons of Sex and The City, then I would be Samantha Jones. And maybe, like Samantha Jones, I’m not meant to be tamed or tied down.

Labels: Harvard Life

♥ Michelle: Auf Wiedersehen!

12/26/2009 02:36:00 PM

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♥ Saturday, November 28, 2009

My Petite Life ♥

For God, for country, and for Harvard

A tiny dot of me in front of University Hall, next to the famous statue of John Harvard and between the American flag and the Vietnamese flag

It's funny how my sentiments towards Harvard changed over time.

About a year and a half ago: "I'm NOT applying to Harvard. Why should i? Its full of overly committed, stressed out, competitive people. Just one word, no."

Last December: "OMG I'M GOING TO YALE!!!!! But maybe i'll still send my application to Harvard off. This chick i hate is applying, and i'm gonna give her some competition. Why not, right? Its not like i have anything to lose."

Last Jan-April: "I'm going to Yale. Harvard sucks."

Last April-Aug: "I'm going to Harvard. But Harvard still sucks and i still love Yale. My parents forced me to come to Harvard."

Last Aug - early Sep: "I'm slowly accepting the sad fact that i'm at Harvard."

Now: OMFG I HEART HARVARD YOU DONT EVEN KNOW!!!11!

Lol

The moral of the story is that no matter how much you think you 'know' a college before coming, you don't know anything yet before you actually spend time living in it. After having spent a couple of days at Yale and NYU, i've come to the conclusion that i wouldn't be happy anywhere else. Granted, a couple of days is no where near adequate to judge a place or how happy you'd be there, and God knows MY first couple of days at Harvard were miserable, but every time i ventured outside the crimson community of Harvard, I was reminded of how much i love this place and how it is just the right place for me. For one thing, Harvard's color is red. We love red, right? Bright, cheery, and perfect for someone from one of the four Communist countries left in the world.

All kidding aside, Yale in the fall stands solemn and sad, its gothic architecture stoically nested inside layers of bright-colored leaves. As the bus pulls away from New Haven you can't help but gasp at the magnificent sight. What Harvard's architecture lacks in impressiveness, it more than makes up for in friendliness. The gates are way less tall and scary-looking, the buildings much more connected and open. Your Harvard ID gets you into all the residential houses and entryways, facilitating party-hopping and visiting friends. Yale, being in the very sketchy city of New Haven, is strictly gated and secured because it has to be. You may die here. Your ID cant get you anywhere but your own residential college. At Harvard, the school newspaper's headline is about someone getting mugged and her iPhone stolen at a town 20 miles away. At Yale, a grad student was murdered and her body stuffed in a wall. At Harvard, as soon as you walk out of the gate there are about six cabs just waiting for you to get in. At Yale, there's no way to hail a cab and it takes twenty minutes for the cab you call to arrive. There's Harvard Square with many boutiques, shops, drink stores and restaurants of all sizes and kinds, and then there's New Haven with 4 major shop houses and 5 restaurants. My numbers are not accurate for New Haven, of course, but the point is that there's so much more to do around the Square, and when you get bored, Boston is about 15 minutes away on the subway. When you're at Yale, you're pretty much stuck with sketchy New Haven.

Then there's NYU, right in the middle of East Village and within walking distance of SoHo, the busiest shopping district of New York City. The location is top-notch, irrefutably, but its lack of a campus was definitely a minus. I like the Yard, even though it's more often than not swamped with tourists. I like the fact that we have a sequestered space for ourselves, around which the freshmen all live and where we have our snowball fights. I like the fact that compared to NYC and New Haven, Harvard Square is such a lightweight on the level of sketchiness. I will probably have to deal with sketch for the rest of my professional life, and so a cushioned college life might not be such a bad idea. But hanging with the Singaporeans at NYU was fun. It's nice to be surrounded by bona fide Singaporeans again after such a long time. I've missed that. Black Friday shopping was awesome, save for the fact that my bag got stolen in SoHo. I lost my phone, money, ID, everything and had to cut the trip short. The only thing i've lost at Harvard is my red Esprit umbrella... I've left my phone at a party once and went to collect it the next day.

Above all, though, i think what makes me miss Harvard the most every time i left was the amazing friends i have here and the sense of security and comfort that they bring. At any other school, I was a fish out of water, not knowing where to go and what the hotspots to hit are. And when the novelty wears off after half a day or so, what i was left with was a tinge of strangeness. I just didn't belong. What defines a place is the people you meet there, and i'm lucky to have met so many amazing people at Harvard whom i'm privileged to call my friends. They're crazy, sometimes even neurotic, spontaneous, unpredictable, fun, unbelievably smart, kind and incredibly inspiring. The people who said Harvard isn't fun clearly a) have never lived here, or b) have never met us. I doubt they can even keep up ;)

I may be really biased, but Harvard is A-wesome. Apply away guys! Come here and join me :)

Labels: Harvard Life

♥ Michelle: Auf Wiedersehen!

11/28/2009 04:09:00 AM

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♥ Monday, October 26, 2009

My Petite Life ♥

SERIOUSLY

Don't ever ask me to post my essays, or send them to you "as reference/ source of inspiration". I've learned, the hard way, that some people have no fucking idea what the difference between reading someone else's essay to be inspired by it and write your own, and just plucking their ideas / phrases and inserting it into yours - or, to put it plainly, PLAGIARISM, is.

Fucking douchebags.

Please also don't send my essays around. I trusted you with them, and i also trust that you'll at least have the decency not to circulate them without my consent.

It's very hard to be "patriotic" and not diss your fellow countrymen when it increasingly seems that plagiarism is just plainly ingrained in their psyche. National habit much?

- End of rant.

P/S: I'll be more than happy to edit and critique your ORIGINAL essays. Shoot me an email.

♥ Michelle: Auf Wiedersehen!

10/26/2009 10:34:00 PM

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♥ Thursday, September 10, 2009

My Petite Life ♥

Harvard after 2 weeks

It's kinda hard to believe i've been at Harvard for two weeks. Seems like i just moved in yesterday and had my first experience talking to someone's belly button (the guy is 1m90 or 6'3, who turned out to be my - very nice - Peer Advising Fellow, some sort of upperclassman adviser), now it's become a daily affair. Speaking of, i went to a dinner event yesterday at the Institute of Politics, wore my 4 inch heels, and was promoted from belly button to nipples. Hey, i consider that progress. Fake progress, but whatever.

I'm most probably trying out for stand-up comedy tomorrow. My parents are so going to have a stroke if they know they sent me off to Harvard to poke fun at myself and make people laugh. It's a good thing that they won't know then, like how they had little to no idea what subjects i took in Singapore, what sketchy program i was enrolled in, or even which year i'm in. I assure you there's no resentment from my part. I embraced, and still do, the independence and the freedom to do whatever the fuck i want. I reveled in it. I'd probably be really pissed off if my parents hovered and asked what i was up to every night of every day. Which is probably why ever since i was twelve, whenever they attempted such question i'd just brush them off. My parents gave up trying to help me with my life soon after. I think at some point they probably deemed me a lost cause... Remember, this is a girl who, at 3, had her first fight with a dude and lost both of her earrings in the process, and then, at 6, gained a reputation in primary school as the kid who hit boys. I've always had a complicated/weird/inexplicable relationship with boys. Thanks a lot to my brothers. We were too close, i now realize. My own homeroom teacher said the reason i was chosen as class monitor was because nobody knew how to deal with me otherwise. Funny shit.

Harvard does not look good. I was sent this "pre-departure package" some time ago, and in it an international student described Harvard as having "beautiful scenery with gorgeous red bricks" and i was like, what? In fact, it looks/is old and always smells of "organic" grass fertilizer. Not a good thing. At all. Especially when you, uninformed of what people had sprayed on the grass earlier, step out of your dorm and take a deep breath in order to "inhale all the early morning freshness". Needless to say, it was not freshness you inhaled.

A lot of strange things have happened on Harvard Yard. And i suppose there are more to come. The other day a cow, like an actual cow, was feasting on the Yard grass. Another, there was literally a live drag burlesque show in broad daylight. There were guys with bright neon green tapes around their ass and glitter all over their body, doing odd suggestive moves. And if all else fails, there are always groups of tourists, looking lost and taking weird random photos to entertain you every other day of the week now.

It's 3:17AM, Sept 12th and i just came back to my dorm. It was another night party-hopping and just generally chatting away with my dorm-mates until early morning. I'm beat, but it was fun. Much better than the last weekend. At least this time around there was good booze and actual parties to attend. Obviously there was a lot of awkwardness, but if Harvard's freshman year has a theme, it'd be "Embrace Awkwardness", simply because everyone's going through the same thing. You're not the only one asking for everyone's name five times before getting it. You're not the only one feeling lost in the dining hall, looking for a familiar face to sit down with, or a topic to talk about. You're really not alone, even though technically you are.

One thing i learned about Harvard, which is applicable to all colleges in general i guess, is that one should NEVER sign up for a 9am class unless there's a hot teacher. Believe me, you need something to motivate you to drag your ass out of bed, and German or Arabic does not do the work. Even hot classmates don't look good at 9am, having just rolled out of bed in their chocolate-stained sweatpants (at least i hope that's chocolate), with a banana sticking out of their pocket. I mean, like actual, organic banana peeping out of an actual pocket. I have no idea why i kept stressing the word 'actual'.

It's so fucking cold here. The outside temperature for the whole week has been below 20 degrees C, and its only September. I just walked in the rain, in like 13 degree C weather. I'm still having a cold/semi-swine flu. I'm gonna catch pneumonia and die in the winter or something. TOUCH WOOD.

It's kinda surreal when i go on sites like CollegeConfidential or VietAbroader now, and see how the high school kids are freaking out about getting into good schools, one of which being Harvard. Nowadays I don't feel like i'm at Harvard. At all. I've sort of forgotten how difficult/crazy/fucking insane it was trying to get into this place, how i was going out of my mind a year ago, trying to juggle the impending Prelims (which i was sure i was gonna bomb, not that i really cared) and the Yale application. Things didn't turn out too badly, but at that time i thought i was so screwed. Anyway, more of that later. I need some sleep.

Labels: Harvard Life

♥ Michelle: Auf Wiedersehen!

9/10/2009 02:38:00 AM

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