For anyone still visiting, I have a new home:

http://sunscentedpillow.blogspot.com/

This semester I pathetically finished one novel (Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler), only because I read about a third of it while traveling home for break (which, with train ride + subway ride + airtrain + plane flight, all in all takes a crazy 12 hours). Next semester it’ll be short stories, because losing the flow of a book by stealing a few ( Read more... )

Hamlet is one of my favorite Shakespeare plays. Besides the richness of language, intense drama, and so many characters with sharp life, I can relate to Hamlet’s obsessive contemplation of his own consciousness. The accepted interpretation that Hamlet destroys himself with this introspection-he thinks so much that he can never act-is my own ( Read more... )

A lot of things have happened. While not everything has been smooth or even pleasantly rocky, I feel the heaviest kind of lucky. It's quite sappy how consciously lucky I feel every day to have everything I do, how much it holds up even the worst days. To inadequately recap. I spent the summer in Vietnam to work on a public health project. I ( Read more... )

When a fruit is in season, people eat it everyday with every meal. You eat batches after batches of longans and think it’ll never end, and then one day they’re gone and you understand, and see how defining seasons are. Bowls are never left empty, and if ice cream has melted you eat it as soup. People like to sing. They’ll randomly break out a ( Read more... )

There are a good number of people who want to do good, who make it a concrete goal, whose careers lie upon this idea, who think about it when making life decisions and when living day to day, weaving it into the background of going to school, making friends, finding love, having fun, getting a job. Then there are a rare few for whom doing good isn’ ( Read more... )

I watched Joy Luck Club yesterday morning, and nearly burst into tears about twenty times. My propensity to cry at overtly tear-inducing film scenes depends on my mood, and my general mood these past few weeks has been Being in the Motherland--all the obvious feelings that entails. And hey, that movie is pretty good ( Read more... )

To get to my uncle’s house you have to walk through a narrow winding road not open to cars. To get here I traveled twenty hours, thirteen of which were on an on the whole unpleasant plane flight from San Francisco to Taipei, and if I had to leave today it would have been worth it ( Read more... )

Due to a traumatic experience with too much luggage in high school, I tend to be a minimalist packer. I've told this story a bunch of times, even though it's not at all interesting or important, but it really did affect me. It was my first time away from home, for a summer program following junior year. Six weeks in Ithaca New York, and I had no ( Read more... )

I came to medical school for real people stories. Blogging by nature is self-involved and I usually have little to write about other than myself, which in college I found to be the main thing I wanted to change about my life. The first year of school has been fulfilling in huge part to feeling that, albeit very slowly, I'm on the way to doing ( Read more... )