xy

I don’t recall if I ever posted about the upper div political philosophy class I took last year, but if I haven’t said this already: I love love love love love my professor. She’s seriously one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met, yet is also incredibly down-to-earth and friendly. Just this morning I e-mailed her asking if she would be open to discussing the possibility of writing me a letter and she said yes, for me just to come to her when I have all my materials together. Not only that, but the response was unbelievably fast. Ahh, thank you. The work day has become so much more bearable. This good news follows a depressing past two days wherein I unsuccessfully tried to reach my writing professor by phone, leaving him a message and a an e-mail and getting no response. I hope he simply hasn’t checked yet. I plan on bugging him just one more time before moving on to someone else. I really should have gotten to know more teachers.

My time off does have some invaluable worth: I’m actually yearning to go back to school. And I won’t screw it up this time.
<3

Man, I feel like I’m stagnating. Hardcore. For whatever reason I’m feeling restless, just three months out of school and nearly a month into my first full-time job. Work really isn’t all that bad — it’s a bit slow at times because I’ve just started and major responsibilities haven’t been shifted my way yet. The commute could be a lot better; spending an hour on the road each way within the South Bay doesn’t exactly seem all that reasonable. I sincerely appreciate being employed though. Just two months ago I was riddled with the anxiety of never finding a job. While time doesn’t go by as quickly as working at the paper did, it’s definitely not as bad as you might think a full work day is.

I figured that spending about two years out of school would be a healthy break for me, working to pay off some of my debt while giving myself a chance to prepare all my application materials. But now that I’m actually out and living through this interim period day by day, I find myself increasingly regretful that I hadn’t gotten everything together sooner. (And regretting not eating breakfast and packing a lunch on Oct. 29th).

At the root of this frustration is a burning desire to get the hell out of the South Bay. See, I have this love-hate relationship with L.A. in general. I’ve wanted so much to get out of here and move somewhere completely new, like Seattle, D.C, Chicago, New York, or San Francisco. Even Canada. But my current frustration is such that I would love just getting out of here and moving back into more urban L.A. county, like Culver or West L.A. or the PLB area. Too bad I don’t have the money.

I’ll stick it out for now, no doubt. One bit of fun I’m having at least is JKD. I refrain from calling it martial arts — the stuff I’m learning at the moment is sort of a elementary primer into Muay Thai and BJJ, with other techniques thrown in. It’s too bad I don’t have the room or the resources for a hanging heavy bag. I need to condition myself properly, so hopefully I can get a gym membership soon.

I don’t even want to post this. My mind is a mess. Help me write my personal statement.

No, linguistics is not “an epistemological system of derivation.” Whatever the heck that is. Some people… One reason philosophy classes breed so much frustration is because discussions often reject scientific and even common-sense reasoning. If you wanted to come to all your knowledge based off of a priori notions, then you’d go in circles for the rest of your life. The most useful application of philosophy is to take tenets that we know and apply them in a useful, logical way - not to sit around talking about whether you’re actually talking about anything.

A pat on the back to anyone who can come up with a good gmail username for me. It needs to be professional. All variants of my name seem to be taken. Or you can direct me to another service that has as clean an interface, i.e. not Yahoo.

Btw, it’s pretty pathetic how some people double-space a six-line heading and then increase their margins to 1.5″ on papers. But these are the same people who’ll end up at the top 20. God have mercy on your souls. And it always amazes me when people think they couldn’t live on 80k salaries. This opinion and the aforementioned people are very closely related.

I need to stop reading elitist trash spewing forth from law school forums. It’s really making me question the investment of going to law school to make anything less than six digits. Why does tuition have to be so exorbitant? Nay, why can’t I just erase all my F’s?

I’m really behind on work and I realized that it’s mainly because after scrutinizing an entire section layout several times and fixing headlines, I’m really not in the mood to read anything except for the aforementioned mind-excrement.

Coming up, I’m going to reflect on how I feel about L.A. and provide an appraisal of my future in it - detailing my love-hate relationship with the city and the increasingly derelict nature of our state. The coming decades will be sad times for all. Except for the filthy rich. Especially the filthy rich and old. Also, is Seattle in the cards for me? What if the big one up north comes while I’m there? While my family’s there? So much uncertainty. As you can tell, thoughts not immediately relevant are tormenting me when Wittgenstein’s Investigations should be fulfilling that task instead.

I did a stupid thing and missed my ethics class again this morning. I don’t blame myself completely, though - I had work until about midnight and the class is at 8. Bluh. I stayed awake through Descartes for the first time this quarter, and now I’m not so stressed about getting to know professors, because I plan on taking some community college courses after I graduate to try and up my pathetic undergraduate GPA. Now I’m eating almonds. Hooray. Won’t you hire me?

It’s been a long week with nominal sleep at best, thanks to the longest shifts at work in the history of the world and ridiculously early classes. Today, then, should have been a welcome break, my morning class having been canceled. Too bad I didn’t know about it. This morning basically amounted to an absurd coffee run - I got to campus at 8:45, got coffee by 8:57 and got to class by 8:59. Oh wait. No class. I forfeited my precious sleep to go to campus to get coffee. Great. It’s ONLY FIRST WEEK?

I want my name to be a third declension noun (refer to title).

I was devastated when I didn’t get into CAMS. I remember receiving my letter in the mail later than everyone else. There was a letter code on the envelope that corresponded to admissions decisions and I knew even before I opened it that I had been rejected. I even cried.

Rewind to a few months before when I showed up to the Cal State Dominguez Hills campus dressed in a snappy suit, ready for the interview that would make or break me. At that point I was pretty convinced that I wanted to be a lawyer, specifically one who specialized in environmental law. I don’t think the people at CAMS took too well to my life goals. I guess they were only looking for people who wanted to be scientists and engineers.

I don’t blame them. I then unenthusiastically went to my interview at Bishop, knowing that my performance didn’t matter, as it was widely known to be a formality. And surprise, it turns out that I scored in the 99th percentile on my admissions test and got into all the honors classes. Cool. Maybe I would be happy here? I later switched to wanting to be a doctor, something that might’ve garnered me an acceptance letter to CAMS had I possessed it a few years prior. And I carried this through to my first year of college - until I realized that I had never been all that great at math or science. So much for being Asian, right? Science had always been one of my favorite subjects. But I wasn’t particularly good at it. I only got a 2 on AP physics, while I got a 5 on AP language. Naturally, it made me wonder whether I had wasted my opportunities.

Now I’ve come full circle - having a goal similar to the one I held when I first nervously approached that heartbreaking interview.

Apart from a few obvious, major, academic regrets, I don’t have any qualms about the route that I ended up taking. Bishop is where I grew, it’s where I formed a big chunk of my identity, it’s where I met my love, and it’s where my allegiances will lie, always.

I wonder if I’ll feel the same way about UCLA four years from now. As the setting for the most turbulent period of my life, it’s impossible to divorce my experience from this school. I love it and I hate it, but its mark will remain with me, whether for better or for worse. I wonder if I could’ve reached this same point in my development through a more streamlined process - taking philosophy from the start, carrying my career goals through until now without the medical detour. Probably not. Which is why I’m not hitting myself on the head too hard.

The real world lies ahead, dire and despondent in its overcast splendor (am I just talking about Seattle now? maybe, if not for the direness and despondency), but paradoxically full of optimism for us silly humans. C’est la vie.

Life is insanely busy at the moment. I have not a free day in my entire week, which comprises everything from full days at work to summer school, LSAT classes, (almost unpaid) daily bruin shifts, and just general farting around. It’s good to be busy, but I’ll sure be glad when this summer is over - because by then I’ll have four classes and slotting shifts to look forward to, yeah! Does sarcasm carry well over the internets?

I’m partially kidding. I am enjoying myself for the most part. I’ve been playing a ton more tennis than usual, thanks to Jaymie and Az, and I’m very happy about that. Of course, I’m looking to up that frequency still, muhaha. I’ll try to be more interesting later. Watch Top Chef tonight!