and so it ends.

wednesday night we celebrated jeff's birthday a day early at jenna's apartment again (haha i'm spending so much time there that i almost know where everything is already)...she cooked up a storm of an awesome meal, and then jeff, meng, niral, salman, and valerie all came over. i won't go into details cuz then this post will be too long but it was DAMN FUN. hahaha. the fun included: seeing all four guys squeezed next to each other on one side of the dinner table, meng offering to tell me how to use tampons and jeff and niral's incredulous reactions, jenna not even blinking an eye when meng asked her if she knew how to use tampons cuz she's already used to him LOLOL, jeff twisting all of meng's toes, salman "vibrating" against meng, watching crazy music videos including tunak tunak tan (INDIAN COWBOYS!!!), gunther (lol the stupid song got stuck in my head the entire night), backstreet boys rendition by wonchon and crew, and last but not least, listening to OBSESSION and singing that over and over again hehehe. and then jenna made EXTREMELY awesome pasta sauce and chocolate cupcakes with frosting hatches.

then i spent literally all of friday at Rice and then stayed over at jenna's apartment again till saturday morning....haha oh man so much crazy fun and wasting doing absolutely nothing but still having fun nevertheless

got to the medical center at around 6:30 am lol, cuz i took the bus into town. bummed around in M.D. Anderson for a while reading orgo and trying to stay awake, and then walked over to Fondren Library to read some more and wait for jenna to get to class. MAN the view of Rice from Fondren is GORGEOUS:



it was even better, because it was like at 7:45 am, when no one was in class yet, so i got a peaceful view with the sunrise and no people around to spoil the effect. oh man, it's indescribable in words. and Fondren itself is gorgeous too - if i was a student at Rice, i'd willingly spend hours inside Fondren just cuz it's so nice. oh and then i saw STACY as she passed by!!! hahaha stacy is soo adorable.

went to german class with jenna at around 11 am. hahaha both of us apparently forgot that her german class is like advanced german, so the instructor (dr. Spuler, or something like that) talked in german the ENTIRE time.woops. lol it was still entertaining though, german sounds pretty cool. and the professor looked like he walked straight out of a World War II movie, he had the buff look and the shaved head and everything. actually for most of the time, the class was split up into groups so i attempted to learn german from jenna's course reader, and stared at steve's bright glowing red hair (seriously, it's like the coolest color of red ever) and at this other guy in the class whom apparently had the misfortune to be given the name of tedward. interesting.

after class, we ran around for a while trying to figure out what to do for lunch, and coincidentally ran into meng, jeff, and niral, whom we were looking for in the first place anyways. they had class, so jenna and i went ahead to DiMassi's for lunch. GOOD STUFF MAN. i can't believe i didn't know that place existed in rice village and i was like right there the entire time. anyways, back to campus to the Rice activities fair to find jeff and to find the free tapioca tea. we ended up running into more people, such as michelle, ann, and other random people. and then we got badgered into signing up for all these clubs. HAHA. i felt so bad saying "no i don't want to join" and i also felt uncomfortable saying "sorry, i don't exactly go to this school" that i went ahead and signed up for like 4 clubs. woops. at least we got the free tapioca though. jeff later amused us by showing us this fobby korean combat game on his laptop. hahhaa MAN it was a fobby game. but very cool though. then we wandered around Rice some more and ran into both Wonchon and Zach again. Wonchon apparently thinks that Meng is a demi-god :D

so we wanted to watch 40-year-old virgin cuz meng and niral said that it was a good movie, but meng apparently loved it so much that he wanted to watch it again. lol. jenna and i met up with him around 3:50, after the activities fair, and proceeded to go to Edwards Theatre to catch the 4:10 showing. no problem right, since Edwards is like a skip and a hop away from Rice? hahaha well it actually took us an HOUR, literally, to get to Edwards. somehow we manged to pass Edwards 3 or 4 times,and each of those times, none of us managed to see Edwards. lol it was funny, all of us were like "damn...we should really know where this place is by now"....after a detour to 610 and all over 59, we finally made it to Edwards to catch the 4:50 showing. it was a pretty amusing movie, i wouldn't say that it was "beautiful" (=P), but i still liked wedding crashers better. burgers for dinner before we headed over to meng and niral's apartment to bum for a while. oh man we had some interesting conversations then:

person A: "so if you were a virgin, would you...oh crap never mind, i didn't mean it to come out like that.."
person B: "what are you implying?! are YOU a virgin?!"

HAHAHAAHAH....ok inside joke, but hilarious nevertheless. and also, we ARE going to make that music video. lol meng's got me totally addicted onto that one song now.

the supposed party at Wiess that night was pretty lame, but we still had a blast anyways. this kid called Scott (i don't even know who he is) was having another private birthday party in his suite at Wiess, and so we went to that instead. hahaha enough said ;) in other news, we saw Randy!!! and two of his other friends also - Ed, his roommate, and Steve, who is Ed's friend. after jumping on the Wiess trampoline for a while, and having uh..fun lol in scott's suite, we decided to all go to IHOP. hahah oh man i hope that we didn't scare randy and ed and steve too much. steve was pretty much laughing his ass off at meng's, niral's and my antics, while randy looked a litte intimidated and ed looked nervous. LOL. jenna and jeff were perfectly fine though, so that was good at least. oh man SO many stupid and funny things were said that night. we finally left IHOP around 1 in the morning, and i crashed, once again, at jenna's apartment. meng and niral took me back to sugar land in the morning. and wow. i guess that's the last time i'll be seeing rice for a while.

it was especially hard to say goodbye to Jenna, Meng, Niral, and Jeff. but yet at the same time, it didn't really feel like that much of a goodbye, cuz i know i'll be seeing them in between breaks back to Houston, and hopefully med/grad school in 3 years.

it's not a goodbye for Houston. it's a see you later. and it's an i'll be back. don't forget me!!!

i don't want to leave Rice! saturday night meng finally made it to my house around 9:30 pm, once again while hyperventilating and referring to himself in third person as "mengdaddy" HAHA. getting down to Rice was quite an adventure, and i will post a picture of meng with the clown nose on while driving. meng's a good driver, but we somehow managed to drive all the way to the end of KIRBY (i had no idea that was possible), and then we had to backtrack to try to find his apartment. apparenlty he uses the St. Luke's Medical Towers as a landmark -->

meng: " i can't find the two boobs! if i can find the two boobs, i'll know that we're going in the right direction"
me: "....you mean St. Lukes'?"
meng: " yea, that thing"

hahaha i'm amazed that i actually understand what this kid is talking about by now. we also have come up with a plan to create an army of male blue whales, hereon after known as "meng's bitches" lol. got to the apartment, met up with some other Rice and UT and WashU people (from clements) and drove to Rice to meet up with Jenna. apparently there were supposed to be a lot of parties around campus, but we got there a little too late, so it wasn't that great. the most exciting event of the entire night was when we ran into this random drunk asian guy at Jones, and he started enthusiastically greeting us as if he'd known us for ages. and then he got to niral and was like "OMG!!! it's KUMAR!!!" hahaha drunk asians are so retardedly funny. i did get to see some other Rice ppl though, like APOORVA at Sid Rich and then mr. ZACH MARSHALL at Martel. hahha they haven't changed a bit - apoorva is still his awesome spanish-speaking self, and zach still has his hilarious sense of humor and his knack at tricking me..=)..although he did a nice haircut. ohh and we saw BETH at martel too - she was drunk and didn't recognize me at first, but when she did recognize me, she must have hugged me at least 5 times in the 2 minutes that i talked to her LOL.

but yes, Rice guys are daaaaaaammmn good-looking. much better than the average MIT guy, i must say (lol sorry MIT)

the rest of the night involved sitting outside Wiess while trying to avoid sawyer, creepy korean movie plots, gummy ladies with boobs, guys trying on lip gloss, and a 2:30 am trip to House of Pies. we split and i crashed at jenna's apartment again...haha i don't think either of us fell asleep until 5:30 am and then we woke up around 9:30 i think. but that's ok, we just went to crescent city beignets and proceeded to stuff ourselves silly with beignets and get all caffeinated up on cafe au lait =)

one more week in houston =(

last few days have been awesome:

thursday - hanging out with thida at the Honda dealership while she got her windows tinted....it took forever, and who knew that you could get free manicures on thursday while you get your car serviced? two hours later, we met up at Thai Basil with Christine. maaan Thida has GOOD MUSIC on her ipod, that's all I have to say. After Thai Basil was a trip to Target which involved Christine destroying the childhoods of innocent children by recording messages like "nobody loves you" and "i fling poo" into the recordable teddy bears lol. and also involved christine imitating the sounds of an electric wheelchair while I couldn't stop laughing, and Thida stared in horror because she was the only one who realized that the sound was coming from an electric wheelchair, rather than a vacuum cleaner, which Christine and I both thought it was until the dude on the wheelchair finally passed by our aisle HAHA. then later on in the day i finally met up with jenna!!!! i think we kinda bummed around sugar land for a while and then ended up watching wedding crashers, which despite owen wilson's broken nose, wasn't too bad of a movie

friday - got up at 5:45 am to catch the bus down to the med center so that I could go to Rice in the morning. wandered around Rice campus for a while, until I ran into a 10-foot tall papier mache penis smack in the middle of the Martel College entrance. HAHAHA. i nearly doubled over laughing while thinking of how shocked mr. conservative zach marshall must have been when he saw that giant dick in the courtyard =P. after much inquiry the entire day, I have finally been enlightened by the story behind that at www.fuckmartel.com ....HAHAHA..yup yup you know you want to click on the link and go see what that's all about...even though martel holds a dear place in my heart because of two summers ago =P. met up with jenna again at her new apartment! it's soo awesome, and she got it at a good price too. we attempted to make pancakes - lesson learned: when the box says to not to turn the pancakes over until they bubble - they actually mean it lol. other than that, breakfast was awesome with plenty of unhealthy yummy stuff. afterwards we went to the village to run some errands and buy candles. haha jenna's fridge smells like ass from whoever rented the place before her, so we basically went on like a candle-buying rampage. we kept running into people in Rice village tho! first we saw Jesus as we were making our way to Half-Price. apparently he was going to Crossroads (since they have wireless acess there) to register for classes since all the internet access at Rice was down. hahaa it was hilarious when i introduced jenna and jesus to each other, cuz jesus was like "wait...YOU'RE jenna!" while jenna's just standing there going "oh great, did stephen talk about me to like everyone or something?" haha. then we ran into JACE and JAKE at half-price. i haven't seen those kids for over a year!!! and it's weird, cuz i was just mentioning to thida the previous day how i hadn't seen jace for such a long time. after the village, we went to IKEA to get random things and MORE candles. we weren't entirely succesful in our endeavors, but we did manage to get a poor bamboo plant that had its roots wrapped up in this weird sort of jello. yummy korean place for lunch, then back to Tapioca express where we bummed around for time before i finally had to go back to sugarland. man, it's great to hang out with old friends.

and then tonight i'm going to Rice again...heehe that should be mega-fun, with updates and crazy stories later

i think i'm gonna miss this summer a lot, even though many times were rough or boring for me at times. i really enjoyed lab this year, and learned so much more, both in terms of lab stuff and just life in general. didn't get to hang out as much as I would have wanted to with the Rice kids, but the times that we did were extremely fun, even though we all bonded too late with each other. things looked up again when i moved back to Sugar Land from Rice and all the Rice kids started coming back into town again. ahhh,i wish i had been able to crash Rice O-week, although that in retrospect might not have been a good idea, cuz i would have gotten more attached than i already am - and then have to deal with more MIT people yelling at me for not having school pride. hahaha oh well. although i do miss MIT a bit now though, since it's been several months since i've seen my friends from there. i miss the kids at sigma nu a lot, and i'm glad that this year i'll be able to hang out with them more without feeling obligated to spend time with other people. i miss my old roommie. i miss my guh guh. i don't miss a lot of people at MIT THAT much though, and that's what worries me, and i can't really figure out why. and then dealing with mixed emotions while at MIT won't be something to look forward to. ahh i don't know. summer, don't end. if i could, i would drag Rice up to Boston with me. damn it i have to let go of this place, although it's the hardest thing to do. you know how they say that first impressions last a long time? they really do, and that's why it's so hard to let go.

solitude vs. loneliness

yea...there's definitely a difference between the two. solitude is when you just need a while to look life in the eye, say "hang on a sec" and then back off just a little bit. solitude is nice, because you get to be by yourself and pretend that nothing, and nobody else in the world exists. solitude is knowing that you can put off all false pretenses for a while, knowing that you'll still be able to enter back into society whenever you feel like it. it's a nice feeling, and never unwanted.

loneliness - that's different though. it's when you're all by yourself and no one is there around you. more specific, it's when you're by yourself, and everyone else around you is oblivious to the fact that you're there by yourself when you don't want to. loneliness is that empty hole that kinda gnaws at you. it's not like being in a prison cell, because you're not being locked in there in your state of loneliness - but it's when you're walking along on a deserted road with other people, but all of sudden they walk on ahead of you, and you're just left there walking by yourself.

it's always loneliness that gets at me though. all through high school - it was always loneliness because i was always stuck working or studying at home while my friends went out and had fun. mostly because i was never let out of the house. it got to the point where my friends even stopped asking me to go places with them, because they knew the answer was gonna be "i can't..."

so i guess i never had that "set" group of friends to hang out with. during the summer after high school was when i finally met people who i can really consider to be the first friends i was really able to hang out with whenever and whereever. and man..it makes a difference. there's just a kind of bond that's created whenever you hang out with people a lot.

and then came MIT...well MIT is a different story.

i don't really know what i'm getting at here, since i've long lost the ability to write coherently, but i guess this is all getting back at the theme of doing too much work and not being able to hang out and enjoy life with other people.

for example. i guess the thing that made me the saddest was when i did the md anderson program again this summer and lived at rice again. i had no idea that i was going to be working most of the time...i'd leave the dorm around 7 am and then get back at 8 PM. meaning that i never got to see anyone else first of all - and when i got back, i was usually so tired that i didn't go hang out on the other floors with other people. i regret doing that. i didn't get to really know any of the other people until almost the end of june, and by that time, i had already missed out on so much. and then, most of the time, the same cycle happened over again - i got so busy that people just stopped coming up to my room to find me. i mean, valentina and mandy came up several times to chat, zach came up once in a while (once because he wanted to learn how to sqaure dance HAHAHA), and kiran came by whenever we had one of our deep conversations in the middle of the night. towards the end of the program it got a lot better just because the work tapered off. but still. those bouts of loneliness.

and now. even in new territory. i've lost touch with so many of my austin HS friends. part of the reason is that they're all at the same schools with each other, moving on without me.

HAHAA i found these on melike's livejournal:

"Yo mama's SO stupid, she thought absolute zero was a vodka!"
"Yeah, well yo momma's so stupid she thought a mol was the thing on the side of her fugly face."
"Yo momma's so stupid she thought a noble gas was what prince charles had after eatin beans."
"Yo mama's so stupid she thought the periodic table was about her menstrual cycle!"
"Yo mama's so fat even electrons can't pass through her!"
"Yo mama's so stupid she thought heavy water was what an overweight pregnant woman broke."
"Yo mama's so prude she thought string theory was just another pervy fashion craze."
"Yo mama's so rank she thought Boyle's law would help her understand her skin problems."
"Yo mama's so vain, dumb, fat, and mentally fucked up, that when the psychologist told her to examine her ego she rushed home to get the waffles out of the freezer."
"Yo mama's so dumb she thought photosynthesis is something the dudes behind the counter at CVS do when she gives them her rolls of film."