August 5, 2010
down memory lane
So I came back from China not only with a lot of new (ie. recent) pictures, but with a bunch of old ones too. My paternal grandfather had been digitizing a lot of old pics, like from when I was a baby, even back my dad’s baby pictures, most of which I’ve never seen before. And I remembered sometime during senior year (or was it before?), there was talk (among who? i don’t remember) about seeing each other’s baby pics. So I thought I’d share. And maybe if you’re nice, you’ll share too after you read this. 
July 27, 2010
almost a real person now…
i’m no longer homeless or carless!! praise God i have both now…i found a roommate through our med class’ facebook group, and the great thing is she happens to know/be friends with one of my friends from high school. plus, she’s asian which makes living habits a lot easier to figure out. we just signed a lease to an apartment last week. i’m totally excited to move in cause it looks awesome! we rented a furnished unit which means we don’t need to buy anything! and i get a big queen size bed . the last few weeks i’ve also been looking for a car. at first, my parents were just going to buy me a used one, early 2000′s for under 10K. but then my mom became hesitant about used cars for safety reasons so i’m getting the car they’re driving now (2007 toyota corolla, silver), and they’re buying a NEW one! possibly a prius which would be soooo cool. so yay, my two big things i had to take care of for med school are done! just need to finish polishing up my thesis to submit for publication (keeping my fingers crossed) and then i’m home free until school starts in 2 weeks. i’m actually heading out to NYC tomorrow til monday so if you’re in that area, i hope i’ll see you!!
September 1, 2009
photo dump + what I’ve been up to for the last 2 weeks
Went peach picking in Michigan with Matthew. His chubby cheeks are so pinch-able, I just want to hug him all the time.
Then Alan came to Chicago and started off the “let’s jet around the country and see all our friends before school starts” marathon. We met up with Joung and Janice in the city. It was nice to see these people again, especially the alum . It’s always kind of weird to think that they’re in the “real world” now, and in one year, we’re going to join them.
We went to Millennium Park, where the big reflecting bean is. Can you find us?
We also went to Shedd Aquarium, a place I hadn’t been to since elementary school field trips. I found a fat ugly frog stuck against one of the display glasses. I think it was dead. Poor froggie.
Then the Tays came to the Midwest!
We HAD to do something farm-ish, so I took them peach picking again. Luckily, raspberries were also ripe so my brother had a blast eating those. Isn’t he cute, hehe.
We took a mini-road trip to UIUC to visit their classmates from Singapore. That also happened to be where my family lived while my dad was going to grad school. It was another weird experience of revisiting the past. This is one of the buildings on campus and there’s a picture of me when I was ~6 (?) sitting on the steps of this same building.
I also got to revisit the old apartment where we used to live. Not much has changed in the past 1.5 decades, although the playground equipment has been updated. I could still point out where the school bus would pick me up every morning and the vegetable patches in the distance where we had our own garden.
It was a good trip Got to meet lots more Singaporeans (I feel like I know half the country by now, haha), and Karen and I practiced our cooking skills the last night we were there.
It’s been a nice week of relaxation and shirking on my applications. I have one left to do (JHU) = 2 more essays + $75. Sigh…applying to med school is so expensive. Maybe I can milk one more day out of my pseudo vacation-from-work, and then I’ll get back to writing again…
August 26, 2009
blast from the past
On a whim I got out my high school senior yearbook last night, mostly because I had this niggling thought that I forgot who our Prom king and queen were and it was bothering me. I ended up reading it from cover to cover, including the notes that everyone writes to each other at the end of the year. Wow, what a trip back down memory lane. There are so many people I’ve never even thought about since we graduated, lots of people I’ve forgotten even though their names were commonplace 4 years ago. Friends who wrote “keep in touch!” w/ their phone number, but whom I haven’t talked to since. All the pictures of life in high school bring back fond memories: pep rallies, Student Council banner painting sessions, blowing bubbles from the balcony during Ms. Nic’s AP Lang class, and the countless times we dressed up for Spirit Days (I was a ninja turtle, Harry Potter, Roman citizen, pirate, nerd….the list goes on). That’s probably one of the biggest things I miss about high school, the school spirit that couldn’t help but make you excited for Friday and getting decked out in black and gold. Sure, Princetonians have school pride, but that’s mainly because of our status at the top of US New’s Best Colleges list. We don’t dress up weekly en masse in orange and black, paint our faces and go rampaging around campus screaming at the top of our lungs. That’s what happens at big state schools like U of M or IU. Sigh…I miss that sense of excitement.
And me…I looked pretty different back then too. My hair! I didn’t remember it being sooooo long, but there’s this one pic in the yearbook of me and another girl with hair down to our butts. We both donated a foot to Locks of Love. Also, I think I was chubbier…or at least my face was. I’d like to think I look better now than I did 4 years ago.
I guess the overall sentiment I was left with after I finished flipping through (it took me 2 hours!) was: Wow, I miss high school!! I wonder if looking through our Princeton yearbook (do we have one?) 4 years later will bring me the same sense of nostalgia. Probably not, but I mean that in a good way. Relationships and experiences are different in college, less cohesive in general, but the ones that matter are much deeper and more meaningful. And it’s cliche I know, but there’s a loss of the innocence we had in high school. The real world seems so much closer now.
If only we could stay forever young.
