i almost forgot to post this. this is depressing news:

As of Wednesday, August 18, 2004 (sometime early in the morning), TAYLOR left for Washington and Lee....meaning that we won't even be in the same state anymore until December!.=( =( =(..this is so depressing, especially since i only got to see him ONCE this entire summer cuz i didn't get to work at the museum this year! (but he's awesome for coming to visit me at Rice!!)...i know i haven't kept up my part of the summer email ritual, but i blame that on Rice not giving us internet access at Martel...it's so sad, taylor's been one of my coolest friends ever, and now we're all going along our separate paths....i got so depressed when i heard the goodbye message he left on my phone..=(...taylor, i know you read this blog, so take note of this: i better see your name in the college football section of the New York Times, PRONTO, okkies?? i'll be keeping watch!!!..hey, if luke can be the "smartest porn star ever", you certainly can be the smartest and coolest football player ever..lol...virginia is one heck of a lucky state..all our times together at the museum, all your crazy but awesome friends at your party, cooking up plans to get rid of "lamar swimmer boy", etc, etc....i AM GONNA MISS YOU SO MUCH...but that's ok, that's what email is for!!...take care, kiddo, and don't party too hard.........








*tear*

There's an article about college depression in the latest issue of Newsweek, and MIT was mentioned like 3-4 times...amusing:

"One counselor at an East Coast private high school says that during the 2003-04 admissions cycle, officials from two colleges confided they were particularly focused on admitting a class that was "rock solid" emotionally—both to help prevent suicides and to reduce the toll on overbooked school therapists. MIT Admissions Dean Marilee Jones says she's looking to enroll 'emotionally resilient' students. 'If we think someone will crumble the first time they do poorly on a test, we're not going to admit them," she says. 'So many kids are coming in, feeling the need to be perfect, and so many kids are medicated now. If you need a lot of pharmaceutical support to get through the day, you're not a good match for a place like MIT.' "


HAHAHAHA....all right, so the key to getting into MIT is to not have to take any anti-depressant medicine.....lol...j/k, but seriously, it all does make sense now... now i finally understand how i got accepted in without being a science/engineering/math genius - cuz my essay kinda played into exactly what they wanted to see...hmm....i guess lab research pays off in its own funny ways...^_^

another quote from the article:

"At MIT, Jones, the admissions dean, gives preference to students who are "self-driven" (read: not being pushed by their parents), based on her belief that self-motivated students are better able to cope with failures. "Our culture has become insane—we're making people sick," Jones says."

umm...well, uh, yea..? GIVE US BACK OUR SECOND SEMESTER OF ONLY PASS/FAIL!!! =P

and then the same article goes on about a suicide case at MIT:

"The strategies used by MIT to deal with its troubled students are at the heart of a closely watched court case. In April 2000 MIT sophomore Elizabeth Shin of Livingston, N.J., fatally set herself on fire in her dorm room. The family is suing the school for $27 million, claiming that despite Shin's repeatedly telling MIT administrators, psychiatrists and dorm mates that she was suicidal, the school failed to place her under intensive psychiatric care, inform her family of her troubles or take adequate steps to prevent her death. "If a student is acting out because of drugs or alcohol, there's no hesitation to bring in the family," says David Deluca, the Shin family's attorney. "We've not gotten to the same point when it comes to mental-health care." (MIT has denied the allegations, saying it treated Shin adequately and kept the family informed.) If the Shin family prevails, other colleges may rethink how they communicate with parents about a student's problems."

wow. that's a little freaky. haha. we are "troubled students"!!

hmm so i guess we are the suicide school after all.. haha....so it remains to be seen what will happen when i start taking my tests at college.....*scary music in background* dun dun DUNNNNNNN....

jireh was awesome, again, as usual!

saturday - played some ultimate frisbee before we started - such a fun game, reminds me of martel all over again....will showed up too! apparently he knows jenny (lin) so he's been coming to jireh (kinda) for a couple of weeks YEAA!!!...watched a tommy nelson discussion video on Song of Solomon - pretty interesting, especially with our discussion that followed after it...and evan can drive now!!!...he's a pretty good driver, especially for being a new driver and driving a manual too

sunday - church! we have an additional pastor now, Pastor Ellen...maaan he gives awesome sermons...the topic today was about God's love, and the interesting thing was that the sermon touched on a lot of topics that i had been struggling with recently, too...it gave me a lot to think on, plus he was an amazing speaker..seriously, that' s the first lecture that i've actually listened through all the way in a looong time (all those M.D. Anderson seminars.......hehe..Ankit made those interesting at least)...and then before youth discussion, we celebrated jon's bday with a bakeoff..hehe some ppl had baked different things, and jon had to be the judge and decided which one was the best (jackie: "and don't say that they're all good!"...hahahaah)..another thing is just seeing everyone at jireh interact with each other - it's so open, it's so honest, it's so humorous, it's so endearing, ahhh it's unexplainable...just the things that they all do for each other, and the way they treat each other - you know that warm fuzzy feeling, or that feeling that kinda just washes over your spine when something really touches you? ..yea, that's the kind of feeling you get at Jireh all the time...hard to explain but you get the point, i think...and they're so WELCOMING!!...i'm sad to be leaving so soon, cuz i'll only get to see them one more weekend before i leave - even though i haven't known them for that long a time either, they've already started feeling like family...all the prayers today at the end of discussion were SO TOUCHING....i LOVE YALL...i pray that there will always be a group of ppl just like yall wherever we all end up in the future, and that yall will continue to spread your love to all newcomers in houston...




evan has these really cool aqua disco pants that he wore to church today..haha...and jackie and lyndy are terrific cooks, and jenny makes awesome chinese dessert thingies (i forgot what they're called in english)





next week i've gotta start packing. ahhh!!!!

man i haven't updated in this thing for SUCH a long time...anyways, i've decided that from now on, everything that i blog about it going to be about nice, fun, positive stuff, and it's going to be solely so that ten years from now i can look back and have a nice stash of memories here...yea, a private journal would be better, but just having it online is easier..and i'm too lazy to do actually go and do private entries on a xanga, so it's just gonna be public...lol...feel free to read if you want, if anything offends you, let me know, and i'll take it out immediately, ok? that sounds like a good deal to me....

anyways..i had such a blast yesterday.....first i went and visited my lab (I LOVE MY LAB!!!!!) at my dear dear dear South Campus Research Building (haha. i am such a nerd.) i brought bing and dou's present with me and also some cookies for the lab...maan, it was such a good feeling going in and seeeing all the lab equipment there, but Huang, the new postdoc from Baylor, had already taken over my bench (*tear*)....my membranes were still in the drawer though!!!..woohoo!!!!...(by the way, the antibodies that were supposed to be for my original project that would have used the membranes FINALLY came in - like a month too late!!!! >_<)..and then i ran into Morgan (morgan!!!!) in the hallway!...hahah morgan is this really really cool PhD student in Hector's lab who i go talk to all the time...he was in a different lab, in almost his last year of his PhD program, when suddenly his professor decided to leave research and take up a higher position somewhere else or somethign like that, and so everyone in his lab basically had to find new labs and start their PhD programs all over again..maan!!!,..that must have been terrible....anyways, chatted with him for a while, and then i sat down and had a nice long chat with valeria (the postdoc in my lab who was basically my mentor in all of july when bing and dou were in china) with our daily tradition of coffee (she let me make the coffee)...there was SOO much to talk about!!...maan i misss her soooooooooo much, she's gotta be the most awesome italian person ever....and then, even more unexpectedly, she gave me all these really cool gifts....that totally just took me by surprise - i had NEVER expected that!!...and from a mentor too....an ITALO CALVINO book ("If on a Winter's Night a Traveler"), a CDs full of modern italian music, a paper crane and a REALLY touching card *tear*....all those memories of everything in the lab...waaaah..i hope i find a mentor as awesome as she was (no, she's not just awesome for the gifts - she's awesome for all the stuff she taught me in the lab and all the patience she had with me too.....kinda reminds me of my mommy, maybe that's why i like her so much)..and then dou was giving everyone gifts that she had bought from china, and i got this really pretty stone bracelet...very awesome too...so our whole lab wanted to go out to lunch, which took about 9203439 hours to coordinate since every time we tried to discuss where to go to lunch, we'd get side-tracked and start discussing somethign else..haha...like we were all gathered on one side of the lab trying to figure out where to eat, and it turned out something like this, with their broken english and whatnot:

xiaofang: but i want to go bing's house to have barbecue
dou: no, our barbecue grill is broken! our dog chewed thru the pipe
kihwan: *joking*are you sure it was your dog? maybe xiaofang break it!
xiaofang: i no break it
valeria: just like you did not kill dou's plant?
xiaofang: what plant?
dou: we came back and that one plant in the kitchen by the dining table is completely dead! (xiaofang was the one who was supposed to water bing and dou's plants while they were on vacation)
xiaofang: there was a plant in the dining room?
dou: yes, you didn't see it?
xiaofang: no...well i still want to go to barbecue at bing's house

HAHAHA...so we finally decided to go eat at the Goode company, which was a pretty good barbecue place...i definitely recommend it, cuz it's self-servign and not too expensive either..went back to the lab, where we looked at all the pictures that Ling took on her digital camera...some of them were really hilarious, i'll post some when she emails them to me..and then kihwan, valeria, ling, xiaofang, and i talked some more about MIT's communal CO-ED bathrooms (yup, that's right, co-ed bathrooms - including showers and toilets and all )..kihwan didn't make me feel much safer about that:

kihwan: well, you need to be careful, because you don't want crazy boys openign the shower door
me: no, no, all the shower doors lock completely
kihwan: ok, well, maybe the crazy boys know how to pick locks

hahahhah thanks kihwan i feel so much secure now...lol..and during lunch dou was telling me about how one time there was a "psycho madman" (those were her exact words) running through her dorms, so all her dormmates took all their desks and pushed them all against the entrance doors...lol..then went back to the lab, cleaned up and talked to some more random people that i kept seeing (Ramon - researcher in Miles' lab, Morgan again, Cheryl - our super cool secretary department, Donna - the person at the front desk, Yasuko - jenna's mentor)...then my dad came and i showed him around, and then we had to leave for the UT med building, where i had to return my long overdue keys and textbook (that dr. dowhan had conveniently forgotten about anyways) back home, apoorva and i had decided earlier to meet up with thida and then darian for dinner cuz apoorva goes off to rice in about 2 days ( ..=(..the first college-bound person out of all of us!!)..but then thida and darian couldn't come or something, so i got miink to come with us, and steve (from memorial) joined us later at texadelphia....lol it took us forever to figure out where to eat too, ....while waiting for miink, we were gonna try to get some coupons out of apoorva's entertainment book, while i futilely tried to locate Westheimer on a houston map.. but while driving, we kept missing the streets that we wanted to get on so we ended up at rice village at texadelphia, where i had my first philly cheesesteak, which was prettty good...hahah i can see why houston is the fattest city now..it took steve a while to find us, but he eventually did with a couple of phone calls between him and miink and apoorva...we talked for the LONGEST time about the most random subjects!!!! this is my type of conversation, constant animated talking..(ok well it wasn't exactly a Martel-trampoline-worthy conversation, but those are only reserved for 4 am in the morning anyhow..hehe) .lol apoorva and all his political subjects....maan, the more i hear about rice the more i want to transfer!!..lol not as if that would be feasible, but apoorva has THE MOST AWESOME MAJOR IN THE WORLD - SPANISH!!...(well he's doing a double major in polisci as well)....if i could pick any major in the world, without regard to monetary issues, etc etc, i would pick SPANISH....gaaaah, yall cannot possibly fathom the PASSION i have for spanish....yea, anyways, we went to ben and jerry's and continued talking there until almost 10:45 i think....lol soooo much freakin fun, i hope i'll meet people remotely like them at MIT... we prolly woulda been able to stay later if the three of them didn't have to go home and start/finish packing..APOORVA AND MIINK, i will MISS YALL A LOT!!!...man apoorva's one of my longest friends (along with a handful of old-schoolers from 2nd grade, walker station! yea!), and i've known miink forever at ascension too...*tear*...


jenna's coming to houston today!!!!yay! i love that chick, she's another asian spanish-obsessed person, and she loves russian classical pianists too...michelle is driving down here today too, and i bet myers is also coming from beaumont today, cuz they all gotta move in on sunday...michelle and myers are two of my really good friends from md anderson too....haha , see i told you rice ppl are awesome...depending on when they come, i may or may not go to meet up with church ppl at jireh tonight...but i'll definitely be at jireh tomorrow !!!...gotta say bye to sid and steve before they leave for stanford, and bye to everyone else who will still be in houston...=(...everyone will already be at rice by sunday, and then UT ppl are leaving next wednesday....stanford ppl don't leave for like another month i think anyways...

i'll be in boston in less than two weeks!