Writing... and Parents

I am not the greatest writer. I like to start sentences with because, therefore, however, etc. because if I don't, my sentences follow the same subject+verb+object format. Most of my sentences are usually complete thoughts - I don't write sentences like, "Because she saw the dawn break." Nevertheless, they are still bad sentences.

So I'm not sure how I'm supposed to write a book one day. I told my dad that I would write a book about him and his life story (although my dad is still relatively young - he's only 45). I think it's an interesting story. My aunts have told me lots of stories about my dad and what a mischievous kid he was. My dad tells me his side of the stories too, which obviously do not resemble the stories my aunts told me. Soooo, it will take me a while to figure out what actually happened...

But my parents make me proud to be their daughter. Yes, it's kind of corny, but I often think about what my life used to be like and what it's like now. My parents worked really hard and accomplished a ton of stuff - like opening a successful restaurant, starting a successful construction company, investing wisely in real estate, raising 4 children - all without college degrees and being illiterate (in English). And here I am, trying to get my PhD...

However, success comes at a price. My parents were not the most supportive parents. They rarely came to my band/orchestra concerts, did not have many conversations with us when we were younger (like, "how was your day at school?"), left us alone at home often, and scolded us harshly (hm, how I love corporal punishment). My youngest sister and brother had/are having different experiences than my oldest younger sister and me (they are a product of our "parenting" instead of my parents' parenting). So, this makes me wonder, what kind of parent do I want to be? It depends on what kind of children I want to raise.

I turned out to be a very cautious, studious, and compassionate person. I don't like confrontation (I tend to avoid it at all costs). I'm also naive. My overly cautious behavior tends to be excessive, to the point where it might look like I'm being totally reckless. Being studious is a good thing (I think). And my compassion gets mistaken for empathy, of which I don't have much. I run away from my problems and I think all people are inherently good. It reminds me of how Anne Frank ended her diary:

"I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart."

I want my children to believe that. Some people say it's naive, but I really do believe it. I also want my children to explore life more than I did, and not be so overly cautious. Maybe they should take more risks... haha, a parent advocating for their children to be more risky.

Anyway, I hate to leave my thoughts unfinished, but my brain wants to shut off. So... it's shutting off. I'll have to continue this post at some other time...

Halloween Weekend

With NSF's due date coming up very soon and the election, I forgot to talk about my Halloween "celebration". I didn't actually celebrate anything - I didn't have a costume and I didn't even have any decorations (which is very odd for me because usually I decorated the heck out of my dorm room for a holiday). But I got to hand out candy for about 10 groups of children who knocked on my door, so it was exciting to be the treat-giver :).

Sergio also came to visit me last weekend. He came on Halloween night, so I picked him up from the airport. Once we got to my house, I gave him a short tour of my little house (short because it's so small) and invited him to eat my pumpkin cheesecake. The cheesecake was really hard to make well since I didn't have an electric blender, so my cake wasn't very homogeneous. But it tasted good anyway!

It didn't taste very cheescake-y, nor did it taste very pumpkin-y, so I'm not exactly sure what to call it.

Anyway, we went around Seattle and visited some of the tourist sites, like the Space Needle and Pike's Place Market. I got to play around with Sergio's spiffy DSLR, so that was fun. We also went to see the Fremont Troll (at the intersection of N 36th St and Troll Ave N) that was under the Aurora Ave N bridge. We couldn't get a good picture of it because so many children kept climbing on it, but here's me on the troll's shoulder:


We ended up hanging out with Aseem on Saturday night. We played Road Rash on N64 (yes, rather old-school), and Guitar Hero on the Wii. Aseem's pretty good at playing really hard songs... I thought he was going to break the keys on the guitar.

On Sunday, Sergio and I went to the Woodland Park Zoo to visit the animals. I took some nice pictures of the animals (which I'm posting on Facebook). For some reason, a lot of the animals had pumpkins with them (I guess for Halloween):

After the zoo, we went back to Fremont to try out a Taco del Mar. Sergio wanted to try it out since we kept passing them and he probably misses eating Mexican food (Seattle has more Mexican food places than Boston does... surprisingly). The Taco del Mar we visited looked kind of sketchy, so we decided to look around to eat somewhere else. We encountered the Fremont Sunday Market, which had a little stand that was selling tacos and tamales. We ate a couple tacos and a tamale from there, and because Sergio started talking to the guy at the stand in Spanish, we got a free rice drink too. The drink was made of rice (tapioca maybe?) and cinnamon. It wasn't that bad and it reminded me of something I've had before... but I can't remember what it is.

The weekend was fun while it lasted and I'm sad Sergio had to go back to Boston :(. I'll be visiting him during December, and luckily, Mavis is visiting too. We can have a little MIT reunion :).

And I just read the comment on how the smitten "kitten" website is actually smitten "kitchen". Hm, I wonder why I thought it said "kitten"...

Bittersweet-ness

I must say, today is a bittersweet day. It is sweet because America has finally elected a smart person to the White House after 8 years of stupidity. I'd like to say that we voted not based on the color of his skin, but rather, Obama as a person. But I know that there are people who voted for Obama just because he's black and those who voted against him just because he's black. But at least it's a step in the right direction. I know many people who are White, Asian, Hispanic, etc. who voted for Obama because we thought he was smart and his stance on the issues, and race was never a factor. So, yay for that.

On the other hand, it is a bitter day because California allowed discrimination to be written in their constitution. Civil rights should not be decided by voters. I'm pretty sure that if people voted whether to give women or blacks equal rights, we could have passed a law opposing these rights. So I hope that this ban is overturned. I've been really posts and articles about the proponents of Proposition 8, and they make no sense. These are the arguments that I have read for the ban:

1. The bible says so.
If people haven't figured it out yet, the constitution says that there is a separation of church and state. Plus, not everyone is Christian or believes what the bible says, so it's unfair to impose the bible's words on everyone else.

2. We must protect traditional marriage.
I don't understand this argument. Protect what? It's not like gays want to ban marriages between a man and a woman. So what are you trying to protect? It's not like homosexual marriages would affect heterosexual ones anyway. Marriage these days are a legal thing anyway. And if you want to protect marriage as something sacred, you first should not allow marriages between drunk hook-ups in Las Vegas.

3. Marriage is defined as being between a man and a woman.
Since when did people care so much about definitions? Definitions change with time. Just compare a dictionary from 50 years ago and one from today.

4. Marriage is supposed to be for procreation purposes.
So why can sterile people get married? They can't help being sterile, just as gays can't help being gay.

5. Same-sex marriage will be taught to our children in school.
Well, now it will. Marriage in general was not taught to me in school, so I don't know where this argument came from. If people are thinking, oh no, the school is going to turn my children gay, then they're stupid. You can't turn someone straight gay and you can't turn someone gay straight. And being gay isn't a choice. I'm pretty sure if people got to choose whether they were gay or straight, they would choose the one that wasn't so pounded against. And if they do teach same-sex marriage in school, it would show children who do realize that they are gay, that it's ok, and it's accepted. Except now it will definitely be taught to children, and children will grow up thinking being gay is bad and they will be persecuted... leading to higher suicide rates in gay teenagers (which is already higher than average).

6. Churches will be forced to perform same-sex marriages.
Um, no. I know of a Catholic church (probably many) that won't allow Catholics to marry anyone else but Catholics... and I don't see them being forced to do it. And plus, why would someone want to marry in a church that hates them?

If you think of any more arguments against same-sex marriage, please tell me. I'd love for you to give me a good reason.

I used to really want to live in California because of its sunny weather and accepting attitudes, but now, it makes me sad. Hopefully the Supreme Court will overrule this ban.

But I'm happy that the country as a whole is headed in a better direction, despite some steps backwards in parts of the country...

Darn those fruit flies!

I read an interesting article that kind of goes along with my science post...
http://demockracy.com/the-fruit-fly-dilemma-palins-war-on-science/

And if people didn't realize, the reason why we don't do all our research on humans is because it's unethical, even if you non-scientists don't understand the relationship between a fruit fly and people.

CSI!

Haha, I just finished watching CSI, which I don't watch often, but it's really funny how much stuff they have in their "crime lab". They said something about using an SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope) to find out that there was gun residue on someone's shirt. An SEM! Those things are soooo expensive, about hundreds of thousands of dollars. And they cost a fortune to upkeep (another tens of thousands per year). So, haha, I don't think forensics labs are that loaded.

On another note, I found a website/blog that I thought was really cool about cooking and baking! It's called smittenkitten.com and I plan on making these cookies sometime soon... mmm...
http://smittenkitchen.com/2008/05/crispy-salted-oatmeal-white-chocolate-cookies/

Science in the Eyes of Non-Scientists

I recently had a conversation with a colleague of mine about how non-scientists view science. Somehow it came up that funding for cancer research might be cut sometime soon since we've been working on the problem for so many odd-number of years, but still have not found a cure. And in the culture of today's world where if you don't find the answer now, you give up and move onto a new problem, I feel that this phenomenon poses a significant threat to how politics shape science.

As a scientist, I've developed an appreciation for the thought and careful work that goes into discovered small parts of the bigger problem since without these little discoveries, we'd never be able to put the pieces of the puzzle together to solve the bigger problem. This past summer, I met a guy around my age who was writing a book about a genetic engineer. When I told him that I was a bioengineer, he immediately assumed that I cloned animals for fun. (He was a literature major in college.) He also started arguing with me that we should have already found a cure to cancer already since we've discovered various genetic markers that are related to various cancers. But I told him that there are many problems that we encounter that delay us in engineering solutions to, say, curing cancer, despite knowing underlying causes. For example, we know the underlying causes to why minorities in inner-city schools don't graduate from high school at high rates. But has this problem been fixed yet? No.

So, if you know nothing about science, you can tell me your opinion about how we should go about curing cancer, but I'm probably not going to take you seriously because you don't understand the scientific method (especially if you think all bioengineers do is clone animals for fun). And don't tell me evolution isn't "real" because all monkeys haven't turned into humans. Evolution may be just a "theory" (which is a good word in science), but there is tons of scientific evidence for it. To conclude, don't act like you're an expert in something that you've only read through some news source, because chances are, they don't know what they're talking about either.

For the record, even though I'm a bioengineer, I don't work on cancer research. I don't even clone animals (I may "clone" bacteria, but they clone themselves). And I'm not a mad scientist looking to clone people in the future... I'm a person with ethics too.

Diet, Exercise, and Motivation

I've been very unmotivated to do anything that requires a lot of thought or effort, so I'm effectively getting lazier. Since I've moved to Seattle, I've been getting on the order of 9 hours of sleep per night (I used to get 7 hours or less). I've gained 5 pounds in the last year (which is a lot since my weight never fluctuates and I don't weigh that much to begin with). I also haven't been doing the work I'm supposed to be doing (like my NSF fellowship application) and I'm only taking two classes this quarter (one of which is all review, so it's rather boring).

I keep asking myself, why? I feel like MIT has partially burnt me out (which was evident at the beginning of senior year). But stuff at UW has been considerably easier and yet I cannot muster up the motivation to do anything. I want to be productive... but, eh.

So I'm trying reeeally hard to be productive. I'm trying to get a bike so I can bike to lab/class everyday instead of taking the bus (it's about a 30 minute bike ride). And I'm going to cut my over-portioned meals in half since I tend to eat more when I'm unproductive. So I'm taking steps in the right direction... hopefully.

On another note, Sharon and I have decided to cut out two cities in our Europe trip in December. Although we wanted to visit Berlin and Prague, it seemed too much to squeeze in 7 cities in less than 2 weeks... so now it's 5 cities: Dublin, London, Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam. It should still be a fun trip and if I can steal Sergio's camera during that time, I should have some very nice pictures to share (yay!).

I'm also participating in this study about stress levels of first-year graduate students at UW. I'm not sure what they'll find out since I'm stressed all the time for no reason (and uber-stressed when I should actually be stressed). Maybe they'll find that I have abnormally high levels of cortisol, a hormone that gets released when you're stressed. And if so, I may just mess up their results...

Anyway, if they do find that my cortisol levels are high, it may explain why I have such a crappy immune system. At least I got a flu shot this year. Weeee.

Ugly Pumpkins

In the spirit of Halloween, I wanted to make (and wear) a pumpkin costume this year. I've always been a fan of bright colored round objects (they seem so elegantly simple and happy), but I will have to put off my pumpkin suit until next year... due to lack of funds (I'm a poor graduate student - what did you expect?).

Sergio took some pictures of a pumpkin patch that he passes on his way to work and there is a hideously ugly pumpkin there. I did not know pumpkins could be so ugly.

Would you be afraid to touch that pumpkin? I would. I'd be afraid to sprout orange warts afterward.

Even though I will not be wearing a pumpkin costume this year, I am very excited to hand out candy to trick-or-treaters this Halloween. My house (in Pennsylvania) is located on a rather isolated road, so the only trick-or-treaters we get are those pesky idiotic racist children who live on the road... and they never come in costume (and they even egged our house once - not on Halloween). So this year, I'm excited to live in a little cute house in a nice neighboorhood. I just hope there are nice children who come and ask for candy!

And the color orange is not as bad as I thought. I used to hate the color, but the color has somewhat grown on me... but I will always be a purple-lover. :)

Addictive News Reading

I've developed this somewhat healthy/unhealthy habit of reading the news while I'm procrastinating on the work I actually should be doing. Reading the news is good in one aspect - I'm keeping up with what's going on the world - but at the same time, I spend many hours just reading relatively the same material over and over, just written by different news sources... which leads me to conclude this: in this era of 24-hour news, the quality of the news has horribly diminished.

Strangely though, I still keep reading it. I read a lot about the election, the global economic crisis, world news (Haiti is flooded!), and news in general. It all tends to make me very jittery and somewhat stressed, although it doesn't affect me that much in my day-to-day activities. Why, I ask myself? I care too much.

I care too much that McCain is old (72!) and Palin is not prepared to be President should McCain get elected and then died; I care too much that Obama may not win the election because people can't bring themselves to vote for a black guy (who is half-white by the way); I care too much that neither of the candidates have much of a plan for getting us out of the economic crisis (although there seems to be some good news today); I care too much that people don't want to vote for some "elitist"; overall, I care too much about this election.

It doesn't help that the news agencies keep polling all the time. But I have to remind myself - the only thing I can do is talk to people and vote (which I already did). I am such a worrier.

Buuuut it does bother me that people want non-"elitists" to be President. This is the downfall of a democracy - the dumb people get to vote too. It takes a certain kind of person to be a good President, and oftentimes, it's not the guy you're going to the bar to get a drink with. Why do people think that they're going to go get a drink with the President anyway? The President has more important things to do than go to the bar.

Anyway, I should read less news. That way I can focus on the news that is newsworthy.

On an entirely different note, I really like Seattle. It does have rainy days (the worst is yet to come), but when it's sunny out, it is sooo beautiful. I live right next to a lake, so it's easy to go on a nice stroll on sunny days.




Now if only I could get a hold of Sergio's new spiffy camera, then I could take nicer pictures (where you can actually see the mountain in the background).

Start of a New Blog!

My sister has a blog on Blogspot and I used to have one on Xanga (that I never really wrote in), but I recently have tried to start blogging again with my old blog, but it's gotten kind of complicated to use. So I switched. If you want to read my old blogs, they're at: http://www.xanga.com/melancholypenguin.

I'm trying to be productive today (despite waking up close to noon), so I will continue this post later...