I had my last lecture of the semester today! Now two weeks of studying for finals. Starting Monday the 15th, 3 finals in all within 24 hours.

When I was 11, I wrote in a now-defunct diary about how I wished I was really smart.

And so here I am in UC Berkeley 10 years later. The irony is that now I wish I sometimes wasn\’t.

I am never pulling an all-nighter again. Everytime, I do one it\’s for a computer science class. And every time I finish the project and look outside to see that night as turned into dawn to morning, I feel a feeling of sickness come over me.

Then I watch my buddy list re-populate itself with people on the East Coast waking up while I still call it sleeping late.

I pulled an all-nighter, but I can\’t even sleep.

I am not busy, I am occupied!

I used to use that phrase a lot a few years ago, mostly because the word busy never fully captured the extent of what I was doing. Plus, it is a four letter word.

To me, the word busy implies I am too busy for you, almost like a backwards insult. It seems like you don\’t have your balance of priorities straightened. Being occupied indicates that it is unfortunate that you are unavailable to do something and you feel regretful that you cannot do that something. Alas, the contextual implications.

So this week, I am occupied with two projects, impending finals, grad school applications (somehow I neglected to realize that some schools require a portfolio-how did this happen!), a presentation tomorrow (because i got out of it Monday due to my voice), lo-fi prototype studies, attending office hours, certain obligations, etc.!

I feel like there\’s some metal ring around my head that keeps getting smaller and smaller. Sigh, the consequences of getting sick.

I have a presentation that I need to do in class tomorrow. It should be easy, EXCEPT that I lost my voice. I e-mailed the GSI about me being sick, but he wouldn\’t let me change my presentation date to Wednesday.

Many things I did not accomplish this Thanksgiving break! Namely, the letter, my two projects, my 26 things. Oddly enough, the most I have accomplished this break is the nanowrimo.

A few weeks ago after having a successful meeting with a graduate student, I came out of Soda Hall and a woman ask for directions to the Haas Business School. I told her that I was just happened to go that way (actually it was slightly out of the way for me) and asked her if she would like to walk with me. She gladly obliged. She was dressed in formal attire-a business suit, but she seemed ruffled. I admitted to her that I had difficulty finding the school my first year at Berkeley. I asked her if she was a professor. Indeed, she was…a economics professor from the University of Technology in Sydney. She was in Berkeley to do research and was going to Chicago later that week to attend a conference. One striking thing she asked me after we had five minutes of conversation was that she asked whether I was Japanese. Because she was pleasant, I didn\’t snap back as I would have. I said simply that I was American and was born near Berkeley. And that my ethnicity was Chinese. As we continued, we made pleasant chat, me talking about my major and my intentions for graduate school. Then we finally arrived at the Haas business school. She seemed so grateful for my help. To my surprise, she handed me her business card and told me to drop by the University in Sydney if I was ever around. And to tell her that I was the one who helped her through the UC Berkeley campus. I walked off, knowing that I would probably never meet her again, sort of sad that I was not an econ major…but knowing that I had made her day.

EDIT: i finished the nanowrimo! 50,088 words! The majority of what I wrote was in my feverish haze this morning at 7 am. That is, 50088 words of…CRAP. If you really want to read my \”novel\”, then let me personally know. It\’s over 400k in Word.

Not to my surprise, I got sick. Lost my voice.

For the past month, my friends were coughing in my face. My mom was coughing in the house. And yesterday after only 5 hours of sleep, I caught the bug. I felt the annoying itchiness build up throughout the day until I had a full-blown sore throat.

I woke up today at 5:30 am and came back to my house at 9:30 am after putting $400 on my card.

Just thinking about how I meet online people all the time, I thought about the Rose story. How it resonates true!

In celebration of Thanskgiving, my family is actually going to have a dinner…for the first time ever. This years is the first time in many many many years that my mom has Thanksgiving Day off. And it\’s the first time that my sister has decided to come back to the Bay Area from San Diego. And what\’s more my cousin Jeff (who recently moved from Chicago to the Bay Area) is actually attending. A true family affair!

And we\’re going to have our dinner in Legendary Palace, a Chinese restaurant in the heart of urban Oakland. In fact, a few months after this restaurant opened, a guy sitting near the front windows…got shot in the back by the Chinese Mafia!

Something to be truly thankful for.

But I am also very thankful for tomorrow. The day where I can rise at 5 am so that I can wait outside in the cold for 45 minutes outside stores to warm my hands on steaming hot deals. Very thankful. Very thankful for spoofee!!!

A snippet from my nanowrimo!

\”The movie of us is not finished yet,\” he said at the airport.

There are many times that you wake up and you think that the previous few days was only a dream. Only because you are in your bed now, back to familiarity. The same walls, the same sun. All the same before you had the dream. But you remember being somewhere else. You remember the moments the day before. You remember the emotions. The physical intensity. The gentle quietly laughing nudges he made when you had whipped cream on your upper lip. Then that is when you realize it all has been real. Do you smile and fall back into bed? A satisfying moment when you think life is good, almost perfect. Or do you rush yourself into nostalgia? Aching for those moments to repeat again.