Being increasingly frustrated with my lack of driving ability, I've resolved to take concrete action and kick start the process of Getting My California Licence, one entire quarter ahead of schedule. But damn it, it's so frustrating to be continually constrained by Caltrain schedules and Marguerite shuttle schedules, let alone the anxiety that comes with arriving exactly at the scheduled time that some transport's supposed to arrive and wondering "is it late? Or was it early?"

I haven't been blogging often, except for when I am sad, and then I churn out long pieces of questionable quality. Since this negative selection bias tends to give one the opinion that my life (insofar as it is represented by my blog) is pretty sad, I decided that I need to remedy this with a happy post!

So, today, being Martin Luther King Jr. Day in USA, was a holiday. It's pretty rare to get a full day off to myself - my schedule is such that I have "free-er" days, but I have like 1 class smack in the middle of the day and then it cuts my free time into 2 smaller, rather unusable chunks. For instance, I have class from 1-3pm on Tuesdays. Assuming shops open in the morning at 10am, I effectively have 3 hours to do all my shopping and travelling. Take off 1.5h for travelling (sadly, I can't drive, so a 20-minute driving distance becomes 1.5h when traversed by buses that come infrequently), and that leaves me with 1.5h to shop and eat. Which is doable, but hardly leisurely.

Anyway, today I went down with Wang Ye to explore San Mateo, a little city a few stops down by Caltrain. I'd been to San Mateo a couple of times before - once with mum's friends when we were living in Redwood City, and once with Bobby and the other dancers after practice. Both times were at night, and thus until today I'd never really appreciated how beautiful San Mateo downtown is. It's filled with ornately decorated quaint buildings - some are kinda in the classical style perhaps, with beautiful pillars, and some others look like cottages.

But obviously I am no architecture buff, and my main reason for going down to San Mateo was... food. San Mateo has a relatively large Asian community, and where there are Asians there is bound to be Asian food. And not of the Panda Express variety - legit Asian food approved of by legit Asians.

Wang Ye and I stepped out of the Caltrain station, walked down Main Street, and discovered Tpumps.
Me: "Bubble tea?"
Wang Ye: "Yes."
Me: "Before or after lunch?
Wang Ye: "Yes. Both."

We decided to get Tpumps before lunch, and then Sharetea after lunch, because good boba is a scarcity here. The line for Tpumps was pretty bad, but we were early and managed to start our queueing while inside the shop (for context, when we left, the queue had snaked out of the shop). And Tpumps is WORTH the queue. Aside from awesome honey boba, which really tastes of honey, and is of the right chewiness, they have hyper customizable teas. Instead of just the normal fruit flavors, Tpumps' largest selling point is that you can mix and match flavors, up to a maximum of 3 flavors. And they have all sorts of exotic flavors that I would have been happy drinking on their own anyway! Blackberry, tangerine, etc etc. To get into the Chinese New Year mood, I ordered tangerine/lychee/pomegranate, and it became a frothy pale pink concoction that tasted of angel tears and rainbows and delight. Seriously, Tpumps is like boba's answer to Starbucks. You can choose what type of tea you want (green/black/decaf), what type of milk you want (yes/no/soy), and whether you want a stronger "tea taste" or "milk taste".

Also, it's bloody cheap - $2.70 for 24oz, which is about the size of a large drink in Singapore. If you choose to upgrade to the larger cup, which resembles a soup bowl (32 oz, about 1l), it's like slightly over $3. Contrast this to Stanford's only on-campus bubble tea- milk boba from the Axe and Palm, which costs $4.50 for a normal cup and is average at best. Still, a 2 way ticket from Stanford to San Mateo costs $10 (I blanched when I saw the ticket price, and strongly chastised the old me for whining about paying $2 to ride the MRT), so good as it is... it'll have to wait until I can move to San Mateo or something :(

For lunch we had Little Sheep Hot Pot, because it's Chinese New Year season and you have to have hotpot for Chinese New Year. No excuses. It was really good - take this recommendation not just from me, but from truly authentic Chinese people like Wang Ye and Bobby (who once happily sent me a series of photos from his dinner at Little Sheep Hot Pot while I choked down dry dining hall chicken).

At the restaurant, they had little paper placemats introducing the restaurant in both English and Chinese. The English introduction was hilarious - I burst out laughing when they introduced hotpot as "Chinese fondue". Also, the Chinese introduction said completely different things from the English introduction, which I found rather interesting. Wang Ye hypothesizes that it's because people who can read Chinese are assumed to have some knowledge of what a hotpot is, and thus are spared the "Chinese fondue" bullshit.

After finishing lots of hotpot (during which I tried some lamb, ew) we walked off our food coma by going around downtown and heading towards Sharetea. Sharetea here was pretty unremarkable - pretty much the same as in Singapore, except macchiato drinks (those with the layer of cream on top) aren't called macchiato but "creama". Also, Sharetea is Asian city.

Sigh I really hope I get to move off campus after my first year, preferably to San Mateo :P With so much good food, I don't mind commuting to school daily. I think. Haha. Or perhaps I should just get a car, and commute to San Mateo for food, because as my mum kindly pointed out, I will get fat with liberal applications of Tpumps.

I was thinking about school fees the other day, and I realized that I am literally haemorrhaging money to be here in Stanford - even with financial aid, it easily comes up to slightly over $1300 per week that I am here. That's like $200 a day. $8 per hour, 8 of which I spend sleeping each day.

So here I am, in the middle of another existential crisis: what am I doing here at Stanford? Dicking around, dancing 4 times a week (and spending more money on dance too - lessons, albeit group lessons, shoes, costumes, etc), taking "cool" courses which have no impact on my future career. Hell, I don't even know what I want my future career to be. There are so many hazy dreams that are so fuzzy they might as well not be formed at all.

There was a freshman internship program at a major bank that I was preparing a resume for over the winter break, but immediately after flying back to Stanford I was overcome by a wave of homesickness and decided that I would not go for an internship in USA this summer, but rather go back and spend 3 months with my family. But, seriously - am I making my parents pay $200 a day just so that I can go back to Singapore and become an office lady for like $1,500 a month? In a week, I will spend on my education here what I might potentially only earn in a month.

Shit. Seriously. Filled with dread now. Why am I not filling my schedule to the brim, taking on leadership positions, aggressively building my resume and fighting for internships? Am I becoming more risk adverse? Am I becoming cowardly?

I'd like to think that I value some things more than others - there will always be time for internships, but there isn't always time for family, and I can't deny the fact that my heart wrenches whenever I see my mum sad about me being overseas. The loneliness and forced independence overseas I can handle - it's just my own pain after all. But to know that I am causing the people I love pain just by virtue of being here - that is truly cutting. How can I ask them if I can spend another 2 months away, even if it's in a prestigious bank making money and padding my resume, when I know that it's just going to hurt them for another 2 months?

And then when I aggressively try to fill my life here with things that I think high achievers do - competitions, leadership roles, classes meant for sophomores/juniors (I dare not even think about grad school classes now) I find myself feeling overwhelmed with the crazy responsibilities - you want me to do what?! I'm just a 19-year-old, still a teenager, and I have no idea where to even start. When thrown in the deep end of the pool of responsibilities, I have never been able to swim; the instinctive response nowadays is to flounder and cry until someone swoops in to save me.

Perhaps I have been cosseted far too long in a cozy place, such that I have forgotten what it is like to yearn for success. Or perhaps I know that struggle far too well, and have no desire to get back on to that hamster wheel. A senior fairly howled at me the other day, "Do what you love!" I wish I could, but it is so hard. And I do not love that.

Still, that's enough self-indulgent whining for now. In the time it took me to type this, half an hour has passed and that is $4 of my education spent on fruitless fretting. Just keep moving. We'll figure this out somehow.