Arizonan Mornings

I’d have to admit that I’m a morning person. Even in college, I’d aim for a (virtually unheard of) 1am bedtime so that I’d be able to wake up at 7 or 8 without having to use an alarm clock. And now that I’m back home for the summer, I’ve taken to aiming to get in bed at 11 (whoa! Before midnight?!?!) and waking up at sunrise. Sunrises in Arizona are just too good to miss.

I’m sitting outside right now, listening to the symphony of birds, swooping whistles permeating the air among the short, crisp chirps. The sky is spattered with wisps of high-altitude clouds and the horizon is hidden by Saguaros, Palo Verdes, and the Catalina Mountains. This morning light is so soft that even shadows seem vague and nearly nonexistent. It’s beautiful out, and I think it’s plenty enough reason to wake up early.

Sometimes I wish that more people would see Arizona as a place of natural beauty and awe. But then again, if too many people realized that the desert is not just a sea of sand where adobe dwellings rise out in the middle of nowhere (”You see those two things sticking out of the ground over there? That’s a neighborhood. People actually live there.”), then there wouldn’t be that quiet, under-appreciated nature to this place. And for now, quite frankly, I want to keep this (albeit 110-degree) haven all to myself.

[I've never seen better sunrises than the ones from my own backyard.]

Summer Reading

I realized, towards the end of last quarter, that I actually really enjoy reading. For the last couple of years or so, I haven’t really read much of anything besides Richard Feynman’s “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” and Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’ Diary. Perhaps this literature drought was brought on by laziness, or perhaps by the fear of disliking a book, or perhaps a mixture of the two. Either way, I spent several years almost completely unenthusiastic about reading. But as my fiction workshop teacher assigned short story after short story, I realized that by stepping back from literature as a whole in fear of reading something unpleasurable, I was missing out from all the brilliant poetry anthologies, short story collections, and novels that I would have liked if I had only given them a chance. And so I was struck by a newfound excitement, one that drove me to purchase a (still growing) collection of books to keep me reading through the summer. So far, I have lined up (in no particular order):

City of Glass (Paul Auster)
Brooklyn Follies (Paul Auster)
Back in the World (Tobias Wolff)
The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Writings (Charlotte Perkins Gilman)
Ana Historic (Daphne Marlatt)
Dismantling the Hills (Michael McGriff)
Nineteen Minutes (Jodi Picoult)
Gilead (Marilynne Robinson)
The History of Love (Nicole Krauss)
Family Planning (Karan Mahajan)
Through the Looking Glass (Lewis Carroll) 

I’ve read Ana Historic one and a half times and am halfway through Gilead. I’m a bit of a slow reader. But I’m determined to get through all of these because I promised myself earlier today that I would stop buying books until I had read all the ones I had sitting on my desk. (I made an exception for the purchase of The History of Love, which I ordered off Amazon about 15 minutes ago… I swear I’ll keep my promise from now on.) So for now, my summer’s an infusion of super-humanities-ing. I haven’t thought about math since I turned in my math final a week ago (Whoa! It was only a week ago? It seems like so much longer than a week ago!), and I’m plenty entertained for now with my 1000-word-a-day writing quota (minimum quota, that is) and my current reading list. I can’t wait to finish this batch and go back to the used book store! :)

Medium Format Love

I went on a walk this morning with my dad’s Yashica twin lens reflex. It shoots medium format film. I can’t wait to finish off a roll and get it developed. Yay! :)

The Thing About Tumblr

I feel like Tumblr is instant artsy-ness.

Tumblelog of Chan

Day 1

This last quarter, I took a fiction writing class (it was absolutely amazing!!!) and we read Stephen Koch’s The Modern Library Writer’s Workshop: A Guide to the Craft of Fiction, which I found to be an incredibly eye-opening read into the world of fiction writers. In one of the chapters, Koch discussed various approaches to writing: whereas some writers wait for inspiration to strike and then crack down on a typewriter, others go about it in a more regulated, quantitative manner, like setting up daily word counts or scheduling several non-negotiable hours of writing. Stephen King, for example, goes for the daily word count strategy and believes that 1,000 words a day is a decent starting word count quota.

Since this summer is essentially wide open in terms of my academic commitments, I figured I would try this method of a pre-set daily dose of writing. Knowing that I wouldn’t write more than a sentence or two if I only gave myself a required number of hours to spend sitting in front of a computer (and I would probably start surfing the internet instead of actually writing or even thinking), I decided that I would give King’s recommendation a go.

So last night, I cleaned up the remaining clutter in my room, making sure that there was not a single stray item in sight. That way, I would be able to wake up the next morning with nothing to distract me from starting Day 1 of my writing regimen. Sure enough, I woke up this morning, sat Indian-style in my comfy black roll-y chair, and wrote. Day 1: success. More precisely: 1093 words. And tomorrow: hope.

Room-Purging

I think that, after living in the limited space of a dorm room for the last nine months or so, I have become accustomed to working with nothing more than the basic necessities. So when I woke up this morning and turned on my laptop, ready to get to work and write, the only thing I could think about was how utterly chaotic my room was. Everywhere I looked, I could see things that could be either thrown out, recycled, or donated. So now I’m purging my room of the miscellaneous things that should never have lived so long in my over-cluttered living space. Yay! Hopefully, I’ll have things neat enough that I will be able to concentrate and begin my summer writing regimen. :)

Summer?

I’m sitting at the airport waiting for my flight to depart to send me on my way to a three-month-long, job-less, utterly undemanding summer. And yet somehow, the end of the school year doesn’t feel the same as it did in high school… There is no gratifying sensation that school is over and the piles of to-do lists will cease to rule my life. There is no sigh of relief that exams are over and that textbooks will no longer be my only reading material. There is no sense of “Ahh, summer is here at last” or any visions of relaxing by poolsides sipping iced tea or lemonade. Instead there is only the nostalgia that there won’t be another quarter of academic goodness after a week of break. I think I’m addicted to school.

The End of the Year

This last week has caught me off guard a little. With in-house draw on Wednesday, end-of-the-year dorm banquet on Friday, the last weekly barbeque on Saturday, and the prospect of packing up all of my belongings into boxes and suitcases, it’s really starting to feel like the end, more so than just putting the last period on a paper. In less than two weeks, I will be on a plane back home, ready to tackle my research-less, internship-less, utterly plan-less summer.

I said in my last post that I didn’t really feel any different than I did when I was sixteen. The other day, we some friends and I went out to Indian for dinner, we were talking about how we may or may not have changed. My roommate said I had, but I didn’t ask for details, perhaps in fear of what she’d say.

Since then, I have been thinking about how this year has shaped me, and the more I think about it, the more I feel like it has. Even though there’s still the goofy side of me, I think I’ve become more serious than I was when I first arrived. There is a sense of this-is-life-now-whether-you-like-it-or-not-so-you-better-make-use-of-it. And the overwhelming amount of opportunities and resources this university has for their students reinforces this in every single way possible. But I don’t want to make it seem like I’ve taken advantage of all this place has to offer or that it is because of these extracurricular opportunities that I’ve become more serious… because I haven’t and it isn’t.

I’ve met so many different people here… from the laid back to the stressed out, from the early birds to the night owls, from the live-in-the-moment’s to the plan-ahead-ers… and, like I alluded to in my last post, I think it’s the people who have made such a difference on me.

I’m less eager to please those around me, less eager to put up smiling facades, less eager to hide who I am by the means of happiness. But I am still not too eager to show who I am. I think I’m more dedicated to my work now, thinking of classes as ways of discovering the beauty in subject matters rather than a unit-weighted GPA on my transcript. Procrastination is no longer something I resort to when I don’t want to do work, maybe because I love my classes so much that I want to do work. But at times, my dedication to not procrastinate has driven me nearly to insanity because of work that needs to be done for a deadline a week or more later. And because of this, I think I have taken a path towards a college experience with more solidarity than I had envisioned. My days begin in the early hours of the morning, when some people have only just started drifting off to sleep, and end in the evenings, when I get out of my last class or finally feel the necessity to leave the library. Sometimes, by the time I get back to the dorm after a 12+ hour day, I just don’t have the energy to cheerily make small talk with dormmates. I have, perhaps, become a little more impatient, a little more easily upset, a little more close-minded in my interactions with others.

On the other hand, I don’t think I have ever enjoyed my selection of academic courses as much as I have this quarter. Math became enjoyable again, despite its ever-increasing difficulty, and I think I have finally come to view it as a part of a grander scheme of things rather than a sequence of lectures, problem sets, and examinations. Music has proved to be a commitment that I am happy to spend even the latest of hours doing. And English… English has become an exponentially growing passion.

Last Monday, I woke up at 7:30 am and read a book for pleasure. It had been nearly three months since I had done that, and it wasn’t really all that enjoyable then. But this time, I couldn’t stop… I just kept taking in the words and turning the pages until there were no more words to take in and no more pages to turn. For the first time (or the first time in a long time, at least), I could truly say that I love to read. And for the first time, reading is one of the activities I have listed on my summer to-do’s.

The fiction writing workshop I’m taking this quarter has sparked a passion in me that I always knew I had, but had never realized was so powerful. Some days, all I want to do it just sit down with a pen and my journal (or my laptop) and write from morning until dusk. Indeed one of the most memorable moments this quarter was the day I spent writing from 11 am to 6 pm at the English department’s creative writing retreat. And regardless of how well I write, I still love it, stubbornly and honestly.

This summer, I plan on doing three things: reading, writing, and doing math. I’m determined to keep my brain from rotting, exercising its (limited) creative and academic capabilities. And as for the people I owe for shaping me, for better or for worse, I will most certainly keep in touch, whether it be by facebook, email, skype, telephone, or an actual trip out to visit them.

It’s crazy to think that in a couple of weeks, I will no longer be a freshman. But there it is. The end of one year, but the beginning of another that will undoubtably be as fulfilling as this one has been.

The People

I woke up this morning and groaned. Even though it was a beautiful day and sun couldn’t be more inviting, I remembered that I had written in bold at the top of my to-do list (which is so long I almost need a scroll to get it all on one page): PAPER. Today was essay day. The day that I would wake up and not leave my room (save for meals) and not even shower until I had typed the last word onto the word document. A couple hours after half-heartedly skimming through Cicero’s On the Ideal Orator and notes I had scribbled during lectures, I realized that despite my lack of motivation to write the paper, it was going to be the last one of my freshman year. The very last one.

It’s been pretty incredible how quickly this year has gone by. Through the rapidity of the quarter system, the constantly changing dynamics of dorm life, and the struggle to get in a decent night’s sleep, I have learned much about the art of time management. It’s different than high school, where most study hours are spent doing busywork. Here, I actually feel like I’m using my brain, and although sometimes, it really just plain sucks when you have a crapload of work to do and not enough time to do it all, it feels wonderful when you literally feel like your brain is ready to shrivel up like a raisin. I love the feeling of burnt out brain cells not because I desire to feel intellectually exhausted, but because I derive satisfaction in knowing that my brain can be challenged up to its breaking point. It’s fantastic, and I think I’ll in school for a while, because I simply can’t get enough of it.

But it’s funny. While I feel like I’ve had all these new experiences, while I am no longer the clueless freshman who walked onto campus thinking that it’d be like summer math camp with more subjects (which it is, in some ways), I have trouble believing that it was over a year ago that I first decided to come here. I don’t feel much different than I felt when I was sixteen. I just know that I’ve had a couple extra years under my belt.

As Week 8 begins and this year draws to a close, I can’t help but think about the aspects of university life that I’m going to miss…

… the campus, the train, the bikes, the walking, the classes, the work, the dorm. But above all else, the people. The people here are the ones I’ll miss the most.

Drug-free

I only just realized that it’s been nearly two weeks since I last posted. I guess it’s just been a hectic couple of weeks. Last week was marked by a trip to the ER, several visits to the health center on campus, and a couple late-night trips on pain medication. It’s crazy. I don’t remember much of what I did last week. It’s all lumped together in a flurry of painkillers, anti-inflammatories, and muscle relaxants. But I think things are starting to go back to normal again. And if anything, at least I’m off the super-high doses of drugs.