the perils of

To call this week a living hell would be an understatement. It might actually be an incorrect statement - it indeed felt like hell, but it certainly didn't feel like I was living. This week was so excruciatingly saturated with long tests and thesis work and oral exams and and sleep deprivation and Father Dacanay and Global Health, that it is a wonder I am still alive (and blogging) right now to tell the tale. I really should be sleeping, conserving my energy for when life decides that it is time once again to torture me. But I have something that I want to say, and it is quite important, and you must understand that in trying to say it coherently, I will be squeezing out whatever juices are left in my last remaining brain cells. I shall not waste time then. Yesterday, I slept for four hours only, woke up at 6 AM, and spent the entire morning studying for my oral exam with Father Dacanay. Worse still, I was so busy studying that I had eaten only a pack of Sweet Corn. By 12 noon

       One day during my Christmas break, my mom, while digging through a bookshelf, came upon my high school Retreat Journal. Some explanation: a Retreat Journal is the final, most cumbersome requirement that a senior Kong Huanian must submit in order to graduate. Any regular senior, on the delightful fringes of a final semester in Kong Hua, would ignore the whole thing and choose instead to focus his attention on more important matters (like wooing second-year Chinese girls). But I was nerdy, and I was "passionate," and I just had to take my journals seriously.        It's amazing, how much I have changed since then. Reading my journal felt like reading a fanfiction about my life; the characters were the same, the setting was the same, but the author was a different person entirely.        And 2010 Me sounds like a total douchebaguette . She wrote about how she was "a fighter", about how she fought for "environmentalism" and "female empower

My blog's readership has grown a lot since my first post. I used to think of my blog as a diary that the world could read but would probably never bother to, and I liked that. That's why when you go scan my archives, sometime around April 2010, you'll find a lot of short, meaningless posts that were the product of an idle, summer-soaked mind. (Like this post, for example, which is nothing but a poorly constructed whine .) But the more I realized that people did actually come and visit this site, people I don't even know, the more I felt pressured to churn out better posts, to write more coherently, to not be such a goofball online. Plenty of my previous posts were written with an audience in mind. Perhaps that audience has enjoyed reading those entires. But now that I want to return to posting randomness on my blog, I just feel like I can't. Perhaps this is why I've been updating less and less. It's been more than a month since my last post, and I real