IT'S LIKE THERE'S A HOOTINANNY IN MY MOUTH AND EVERYONE'S INVITED

this was in my e-mail inbox today:


"Dear Mallory Chan:

Congratulations! We are pleased to inform you that the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine Admissions Committee is offering you a place in the freshman class matriculating in August 2009.

... blah blah blah and some other stuff."


it is an excellent holiday present.

Wow, so it's been over 4 months since I last posted.  About something kinda trivial too.  Hehe.

Anyways, much has happened, dear Mindsay journal + 2 people who actually read this.  I've taken up knitting!  And it's taken me by storm!!  My knitting adventures are now on Blogger.

What else?  Med school applications!  I hate them!  I've finished every one that I want to apply to except one - Mount Sinai in NY.  I've gotten interviews at Colorado (already did), Washington in St. Louis (already did), New York Medical College, and Harvard (both in February).  Yay!  I've gotten rejections from Mayo, UCSF, UCSD, and Case Western, and I think another one, I can't remember.  Boo.  I'm still waiting on NYU, Cornell, Columbia, and Creighton.  I'm sure you can tell where I really want to go, geographically, that is.

What else?  Work.  And more work.  But it's all good.  I enjoy it, though every now and then I have a bad day.

Hmm... I thought there was more.  Oh well.  I guess work and applications and knitting has taken up a lot of my time lately.

I do have a rant though.  Christmas songs.  I hate them.  Well, hate is a strong word.  I don't enjoy them.  ESPECIALLY when they are played 24 hours a day for an entire month on the radio, in stores, in restaurants.  They have this sick and twisted way of embedding themselves into your head and then coming out your mouth.  Boo.  And my coworker, starting on December 1, has begun playing Christmas music from his iPod and from KOOL 105.1 (or whatever radio station that plays Christmas music all day long) in the office throughout the entire workday.  And I suspect he'll keep playing them until Christmas comes.  More BOO!!  I mean, playing music on Christmas Eve/Day or the couple days before is fine.  But do you really have to claim the entire month of December?  And even the second half of November for crying out loud!!  No other holiday permeates throughout society as much as Christmas does.  Don't get me wrong, I like Christmas - OK, so I'm not Christian, I just like getting presents, whatever - but I don't think it has to take over December.

Whew, glad I got that out.

so i was in the bathroom at work just now, and i found my first real white hair.  fully white, from root to end.

i'm getting old and i'm only 22

so i finally submitted my primary application for medical school.  on what i'm pretty sure is the last possible day to get it processed in time for my committee letter to be written.  whew!

originally, i was going to apply to 10, maybe 15 schools.  much less than the average (which i think is around 20).  i ended up applying to 20.  $730!!  ah well, such is the sacrifice we make for our dreams, eh?  actually my dad ended up paying for most of it.  he does have a lot more money than i do...

at some point i'll find out which schools liked my primary application enough to send me a secondary application.  hopefully that will be soon.  first, the application service has to verify all my information, grades, test scores, etc.  then i get to request my committee letter/recommendation letters.  those get sent to the application service and then the entire application is sent to my schools.  who send me another application.  fingers crossed.

i don't know if that process made sense the way i said it.

anyways, to celebrate, i'm going spend money at the apple store (.com).  my dad gave me a $500 apple gift card (yeeha!) for my birthday.  it's from grant money, so it's less of a deal than it he'd paid for it out of pocket.  i went to the apple store, but there wasn't anything these that i needed or wanted.  i thought about getting an iphone, but i'm sure those will get even cheaper in the future and i already have a cell phone.  on verizon   i was also thinking about a camera, but i have one of those also.  not as good as some in the store, but i'm not much of a photographer, so it's not a big deal.  i wanted speakers, but the ones in the store were ugly.  or for ipods.  which i don't have.  so to the online store i went.  here's what i've found so far:

coolio messenger bag/backpack hybrid that's supposed to be pretty comfortable
pretty speakers, small but works well for its size (i don't need huge ones anyway)
microphone, because the one in my macbook stinks and this one's pretty

i haven't made these my final purchases yet, i'll look around for a bit longer.

my indian religion professor is so funny.  today at the beginning of class, she was looking through her overhead sheets and couldn't find the first page, so she decided to start lecturing and asked her ta (john) to look for it.  so he's looking through a stack of overhead sheets and she starts lecturing and suddenly realizes that the first sheet is already on the projector.

my lit paper is due today at 2pm, and i have my intro paragraph done.  i think i'll just turn it in tomorrow for a lesser grade.  i've been trying to get the paper done since last thursday, but haven't been able to get started. well, i did get started, but then furthre reading revealed that my proposed thesis was false. ha. start over? nah, let's work on a presentation in a class i'm taking pass/fail and work 4 hours making a video that no one in class could even hear.  i'm such a slacker.

i feel like everyone's talking about it-- all the time.  loudly and around me.  just stop.

well, i kinda feel like talking to someone, but am not sure who, so i guess i'll confide in you, mac computer in the library, and you, internet people who chance upon my ancient and ignored online journal.

so, lately i've been feeling like life is coming too fast and things are just falling apart.  i know my life is cake compared to others-- i have food, clothing, housing, and i get to go to college without having to take out loans.  but my last semester here, which i thought would be one of the most fun in college, has turned out to be much more than i can take.  yeah, i procrastinate, but really not too much more than i have in the past.  and i've already dropped a few extracurricular activities already.

i work in biological research lab here on campus and i wanted to defend an honors thesis this semester, but my experiments haven't been working at all and i haven't gotten data in two years.  i know i can write an honors thesis without data, but i really don't understand what i'm doing wrong.  they just aren't working out and i've been getting more down each time an experiment doesn't work, which has happened countless times.  over two years.  plus, i defend in about a month, and really haven't been able to start writing it.  i have no idea when i'll be able to start because i just have so much going on.

let's move on to my med school applications, which are going nowhere (and yes, i'm pre-med, and am completely aware of all the associated stereotypes).  my application essay is a disaster.  i have no idea what i'm writing and how to write it.  i have a draft, it's absolutely terrible and need to start over completely.  also, i am nowhere near getting all my materials in for the committee letter.

i applied for teach for america and got an interview, which was awesome, but my dad is completely incapable of understanding why i want to do tfa.  fyi, my dad is a doctor and is all up in my business about med school (side note: he did not push med school on me-- this was my choice; i honestly don't think it matters what i go into, my dad would probably still be too over-protective and all busy-body about my life-- if you know any traditional asian families, you know should what i'm talking about).  my dad didn't even want me to take time off after college, he wanted me to go straight to med school, but i insisted on taking a year off.  i don't think he understands that i want to live my life, not just work all the time, but for my dad, work = his life, and i think he wants the same thing for me.

those are the main worries.  there are other things, but i won't go into them.

anyways, all these problems have been here since the beginning of the semester, and for a while i thought i was dealing with them alright.  i had a couple freak-outs, but i was actually getting some things done for a while.  and then it all came crashing down yesterday.

i am competitive.  let's start with that.  but i try to keep it internal b/c i know it's annoying when someone is just always competing with everyone.  even i get annoyed by people like that.  anyways, i found out last night that a guy i don't particularly like (because he's freaking arrogant, wordy, and repetitive) got a higher score than me on the mcat.  there's not a whole lot of people i'll admit i'm better than, but i'm pretty sure i'm better than him.  when i saw the score, which he surreptitiously snuck into an e-mail forwarded to me, i couldn't think.  i fell apart.  i was in the lab at the time and had just found out that yet another one of my experiments had failed so was definitely not ready to see that e-mail.  i honestly felt sick.  i got so angry and my somewhat dislike for him turned into pure hatred.  for about an hour, i did absolutely nothing.  i went to one of my favorite places on campus and just sat there, stewing in my own anger, hating him and hating myself for not doing better.  hate is a strong word, but that's what i felt at the time.  intense, undiluted anger, which turned into sadness and hopelessness.  nothing else i was doing made any more sense.  i felt like i couldn't handle anything anymore.  i went home, watched a movie, and fell asleep (even though i needed to study for a test i have on friday (tomorrow).

i woke up this morning and for the first time in my four years here, i felt like giving up.  i felt like doing absolutely nothing for the rest of the day and for the rest of my life.  i felt broken.

somehow i got myself out of bed, on the bus, and into my first class, but that feeling is still there.  a heavy sadness, threatening to show itself, even here, in the library, in front of all these people.

i don't actually know how i'll feel when i see that guy (because i have to see him tonight at a meeting), but i haven't been able to re-open that e-mail since.

i just feel like i could just completely fall apart at any minute.  i haven't been able to concentrate on anything and i still have that freaking test tomorrow, which i haven't read for.  and it's a stupid in-class essay, which i am horrible at.

well, thanks for reading, if you finished.  and if you have something bad to say, have compassion and please don't say it.  i guess i should get back to studying now.

it's so sad what people will write about these days...

i just wrote and turned in the worst 10-page paper ever in the history of everything.

i want to be somebody's summer

i meant to post this a while ago, but i've had a busy week...

ok, so i was at the mall with my dad and my brother and as we were entering this boy, who was probably 11, maybe 12, was holding the door open for his parents. and he kept holding the door open for a man who was hauling 3 large bags and talking on the phone, and he kept it open for us to enter, and he did it smiling. i thanked him and thought... how many 12 year old boys hold the door open for people? not many that know of. not even 12 year old girls hold the door open. and then i thought, wow, there are still people in this world who are kind enough to just hold the door open for people. and not for family or for someone they're dating. a complete stranger. or perhaps i just live in a hostile world.

i saw this comment on youtube for regina spektor's fidelity music video:

me4muzik  (7 hours ago)
 ho my frend told me 2 check out hur vid cuz i lukd a hell of a lot lyk hur,ths chik is cool! she's..difrent,noones dun anythng kwite lyk it

ahhh!!!! this stuff drives me crazy!!!!!!!

ok i have a test i gotta study for now. i promise to post an actual entry soon!!

so what have i been up to this semester?

 

mostly school, lotsa procrastinating, a little work on the side, and some fun as well.

 

i've been in a great big funk for the last semester and a half and i'm just trying to figure out how to get myself back to where i was. so i dropped the village council president thing, since that was just draining all my energy last semester. i started going back to buddhism meetings. less facebook/myspace procrastinating (though i just discovered that willvill has the law and order svu discs that we can borrow, so... yes, i have been watching more of that than i should have been )

 

i seem to have lost the drive i had freshman year. i haven't gotten a 100 on an exam since fall 2005. i pulled my first all-night last night since freshman year. i could usually do these no problem but sophomore year i was freaking exhausted and i had no idea what it was. hopefully i can get back into the groove (that's what i've been telling people for the past year). sigh...

 

i did buy my first video camera though i have a cool idea for a movie, but it's just an idea and it'll probably take a lot of time, so it might have to wait until summer. if anyone with more experience wants to help, that would be cool...!  (yay smileys!!)

 

anyways, let me know what you're all up to (you 3 people who read this).

i am so bored, i just watched tv for 4 hours. it's all cold and snowy outside and i have no car and i don't really feel like studying or reading anymore. my brother's no fun, since all he does is play starcraft/age of empires all the time.

you know what? i was just thinking about all the things i didn't feel like doing and i realized there's actually a lot of other things that i could/want to do!

have a good winter break everyone (who's in school)!!

someone asked a question in my las post about why kevin carter didn't help the girl while he was there. i was also wondering why he didn't, so i looked him up on wikipedia and found the following:

In March 1993 Carter made a trip to southern Sudan with intentions of documenting the local rebel movement. However, upon arriving and witnessing the horror of the famine, Carter began to take photographs of starving victims. The sound of soft, high-pitched whimpering near the village of Ayod attracted Carter to a young emaciated Sudanese toddler. The girl had stopped to rest while struggling to a feeding center, wherein a seemingly well-fed vulture had landed nearby. He said that he waited about 20 minutes, hoping that the vulture would spread its wings. It didn't. Carter snapped the haunting photograph and chased the vulture away. However, he also came under heavy criticism for just photographing — and not helping — the girl:

"The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene." [2]

The photograph was sold to The New York Times where it appeared for the first time on March 26, 1993. Practically overnight hundreds of people contacted the newspaper to ask whether the child had survived, leading the newspaper to run a special editor's note saying the girl had enough strength to walk away from the vulture, but that her ultimate fate was unknown. On April 2, 1994 Nancy Buirski, a foreign New York Times picture editor, phoned Carter to inform him he had won the most coveted prize for photography. Carter was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography on May 23, 1994 at Columbia University's Low Memorial Library.

He later confided to friends that he wished he had intervened and helped the child. Journalists at the time were warned never to touch famine victims for fear of disease. This criticism and the death of a close friend, Ken Oosterbroek, who was accidentally shot and killed in Tokoza on April 18, 1994 while covering township violence, may have contributed to Carter's tragic suicide. On July 27, 1994 Carter drove to the Braamfonteinspruit river, near the Field and Study Center, an area he used to play at as a child, and took his own life by taping one end of a hose to his pickup truck’s exhaust pipe and running the other end to the passenger-side window. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning at the age of 33. The last person to see Carter alive was Oosterbroek's widow, Monica. Portions of Carter's suicide note read:

"I am depressed ... without phone ... money for rent ... money for child support ... money for debts ... money!!! ... I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain ... of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners...I have gone to join Ken if I am that lucky." [3]

a reminder that no matter how bad our lives may get, at least we're still alive.



although this photo was taken 12 years ago, hunger is still a huge problem all over the world.

learn more here:
bbc article about hunger in africa
world vision
poverty facts and stats
the miniature earth

this video is hilarious!! i can't stop watching it! one of snl's funny ones. i don't really like justin timberlake, but he did a good job with snl on this episode, so i definitely like him more than i used to.

yup, so it's definitely been a long while since i've posted. here's quick rundown of what i've been up to: school (of course), village council president, firefly (the tv series) obsession, kendo classes, resigned from presidency, school. are you serious?! that's all i've been up to?! no, not really, there's a whole lot of other stuff in there, but it'll take a long while to talk about it all and i don't think you want to hear it all... whoever's reading this... if you're curious, just ask. i might elaborate on it when i have more time. anyways, i really just wanted to post up one thing, becasue truthfully, it's been a hard semester, definitely not one of my best since i started here at cu. so, i got the following in an e-mail a couple weeks ago, reread it tonight, and thought 1) well, i've had a hard semester, i'm more than a little grumpy, which is to say my basal level of anger is a lot higher than normal, having had more than one emotional/mental breakdowns in the past few months, and this made me put things in perspective and calm down a bit, and 2) even though i'm not christian, i think it's just a good message to put out there.



There was a blind girl who hated herself just because she's blind.  She hated everyone, except her loving boyfriend.  He's always there for her.  She said that if she could only see the world, she would marry him.

One day, someone donated a pair of eyes to her and then she could see everything, including her boyfriend.  Her boyfriend asked her, "Now that you can see the world, will you marry me?"  The girl was shocked when she saw that her boyfriend was blind too, and refused to marry him.

Her boyfriend walked away in tears, and later wrote a letter to her saying, "Just take care of my eyes, dear."

This is how human brain changes when the status changes.

Only few remember what life was before and who has always been there even in the most painful situations.



Life Is A Gift

Today before you think of saying an unkind word, think of someone who can't speak.

Before you complain about the taste of your food, think of someone who has nothing to eat.

Before you complain about your husband or wife, think of someone who's crying out to God for a companion.

Today before you complain about life, think of someone who went too early to heaven.

Before you complain about your children, think of someone who desires children but they're barren.

Before you argue about your dirty house, when someone didn't clean or sweep, think of the people who are living in the streets.

Before whining about the distance you drive, think of someone who walks the same distance with their feet.

And when you are tired and complain about your job, think of the unemployed, the disabled, and those who wished they had your job.

But before you think of pointing the finger or condemning another, remember that not one of us are without sin and we all answer to one Maker.

And when depressing thoughts seem to get you down, put a smile on your face and thank God you're alive and still around.

Life is a gift:  LIVE IT, ENJOY IT, CELEBRATE IT, AND FULFILL IT!!

so yesterday, being the nerd that i am, didn't really know that there was a game that day, well, i guess i knew seeing as how the homecoming parade was the day before and everyone was wearing a cu buff shirt today. but anyways, i didn't really care about the game yesterday, so i went to campus to do some science in the lab where i work. this was about at halftime. it turns out i can see the jumbotron of the football stadium from my window at the lab, with the score and time and such. buffs were down 7-10. eh. i went on my merry little science way and did some cloning and started paying attention when the buffs and baylor were tied at... i think 24-24 at the end of the 4th quarter. now, if any of you have been paying attention to college football, cu has been losing every single game this season, so it was gettin' kinda exciting there. buffs end up losing in triple overtime. like i care. the funny part (for me, at least) is coming up. as people were starting to stream out of the stadium, a man with a megaphone and a big yellow sign that says "JESUS SAVES" starts yelling at people as they go past. haha, jesus saves, but he still can't save the buffs from their losing streak! i couldn't really hear what he was saying from my window (it doesn't open), but i was thinking, that no matter what he was saying, now is probably not a good time to start recruiting people to join your religion. cu just lost their 6th or so straight game in a row, they aren't going to be receptive to someone yelling at them and they certainly aren't going to believe in any miracles. anyways, that was my funny story of the... yesterday.

in other news, i received my serenity dvd in the mail yesterday and i'm rearin' to watch it sometime tonight if i finish all my hw. sweet!! it'll be exciting!!! i've watched it once before, but i had never heard of firefly much less seen an episode at the time. now that i'm almost completely obsessed with firefly, i'm betting i'll appreciate the movie a whole lot more for those of you who haven't seen either, go watch it!!!