End of the semester

My suitemates finally took down the Christmas tree and the snowflakes, not because the holiday season is over long long ago but because they have to move out. The bunch of smiley faces that used to squat in the room next to mine said their goodbyes and apologized for their late night madness. The resident that cooked up storms in the basement kitchen gave us a really fancy box of tea.

The official ending to the spring semester was marked by a very long and hectic move-out process. I had to go up and down to check out residents and their rooms for 6 hours on both Thursday and Friday, and 4 hours Saturday morning. The entire Hemenway was blocked by cars of parents that the ghettofabulous police had to come and shout over loudspeaker, “MOVE YO CAR!” There is no room to walk in the building either. At one point I saw my life flash in front of my eyes when a parent walking up the stairs in front of me almost dropped a box of kitchen wares. I wonder if there had been knives in the box.

12pm on Saturday we had the whole building emptied. “Emptied” and I really mean it, by pushing the procrastinators, harassing the pack-as-he-go movers, or threatening to sue the rich kid that said, “I don’t want them anymore, can’t I just leave them all here?” The RD wanted a ghost building by 12pm and we didn’t want to be stuck checking out residents all day on such a sunny Saturday either. This girl was nowhere to be found at 11:45am and a lot of her stuff were unpacked. We were told to stuff everything into five trash bags and take them out of the building. Of course it was followed by intense drama when she came back. Emotions as well as profanity flew high but my RD is an amazing smooth talker and actually got her to apologize. I’d like to think I have learned a few things from my RD, at least by passive diffusion.

When the last resident returned his keys, I am technically relieved of my RA responsibilities although I will still have free meals and ID access for another ten days. No more house arrest of duty nights and mind-eating boredom of proctor shifts. I really think I enjoyed this semester despite all the unfortunate things that included: dealing with bloody broken fingers of a resident very late one night; calming down the girl that obtained a court restraining order against her roommate who jokingly threatened to kill her; talking to the girl who bawled her eyes out 2am in the morning; and listening to the entire history of the troubled family of an 18-year-old. Now no more of that. When they all moved out in one piece, both physically and emotionally, it is as much as a burden off my shoulders as a dance that finished nicely. I am responsible for only my own body and behavior and not the whole building. I feel like dancing.

The photos

Photography, a journey through strange and familiar moments.

Olivia Parker's Pods of Chance. A row of peapods, alike in structure but alive in their variation, is fascinating. A row of plastic floweres identical in their structure but dead in their sameness has little appeal, unless their had been chewed by a dog, varied, altered by living energy.

Le baiser de l'hôtel de ville "Kiss by the Hotel de Ville" by Robert Doisneau. A picture is worth a thousand words. In this case it is iconistic and the whole world romanticizes the French manners of living based on this picture.

Some pictures don't need a purpose other than to make you smile.

Some pictures are political, like this one that won Horst Faas a 1965 Pulitzer Prize. The most terrible war pictures EVER. The father, although to no avail, pleads for a witness to his grief. The corporal, the only hatless one, provokes reactions in the rest of the soldiers with his relatively compassionate gesture. Maybe he also has a child, same age as the dead one in the father's hands. The little cottage in the background seems so lifeless and hopeless.

What is illusion anyways.

Insomnia

Very SEVERE insomnia today! Had a cup of coffee at 8pm, haven’t been able to sleep and it’s 4am already!!! My eyes don’t even blink and not even Biochem can put me to sleep. Watched “Love the hard way” starring the fabulous Adrian Brody for the millionth time. I got really bored and started cleaning my email accounts. I organized all the emails into folders and I have 4 email accounts. When I got to yahoo email, one of the emails from Seventeen.com intrigued me: “How do guys see you?” You just gotta love old email accounts that still have subscriptions to magazines from way back in the days. So I took the quiz and was very pissed off to find out that I am a “Goofy Party Gal”. Apparently I am too much all at once! Next thing you know I went into deep self scrutiny, or started writing a blog entry complaining about it. I think not being taken seriously can hurt but there is no need to be so stern all the time that someone needs to tell you to lighten up. It so happened that one day I was teasing someone about alcoholic drinks, and this person suddenly turned very solemn and said to me, “you should be aware of guys that buy you shots.” I was completely thrown off, like the temperature just dropped from 76 to 31. I must have missed a lesson or two growing up, because I seem to miss the signals for the change of gear. Where do we draw a line between joking around and meaningful conversations? Okay, time to go to sleep.
p.s. ( http://auth.seventeen.com/wrapper/funstuff/
quizzes/reallife/gsy/quiz_question1.epl)

Ever the same

Fall on me
Tell me everything you want me to be
Forever with you forever in me
Ever the same

Have you ever felt like there is a song you associate with a particular time in your life? There was a time when I had Usher & Alicia Keys’ “My Boo” on repeat; or a couple of months that I listened to Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful” to fall asleep; or waaaayy back when I could remember every word to Celine Dion’s “My heart will go on”. Hearing an old favorite on the radio brought out memories so strong that I can almost smell the pizza shop that was always there when we played the song on repeat.

This year, for some reason, Rob Thomas’ “Ever the same” is on my repeat list, above “Check up on it”, or “SOS” or “So Sick”. I don’t even think many people like that song, but I have it on repeat.

We would stand in the wind
We were free like water
Flowing down
Under the warmth of the sun
Now it's cold and we're scared
And we've both been shaken
Hey, look at us
Man, this doesn't need to be the end

We are always scared of changes. It is in the midst of dramatic changes that we desperately hope important things, like family, friendship and dreams, will remain constant. “Ever the same”, how is that possible? Even diamonds degrade. But is a balance, a net equilibrium of dynamic exchanges possible? A really picky parent asked me a question when I gave campus tours to the accepted students on Welcoming Day, “How does Northeastern keep the unity of students when people go on different schedules?” I guess he was trying to get at how people stay in touch when Co-op and classes get in the way. Hello! There is a thing called “internet”, there is another thing called “cell phone”. You only see large congregations of freshman or high school kids migrating back and forth from dinning hall to the dorm, like march of penguins. Perhaps the tendency to do EVERYTHING together is lost, but hopefully there is a new understanding in spite of distances, time or thoughts unexpressed (or gossip unexchanged).

Fall on me
Tell me everything you want me to be

Just let me hold you while you're falling apart
Just let me hold you and we’ll both fall down

Is it hopeless or sanguine? No one can be EVERYTHING you want them to be. But the offer to be a better friend is sincere. Some other song goes, “Teach me right from wrong, and I will show you what I can be.”