Come tomorrow, finals week will begin! I am remarkably unprepared. People who know how I studied in high school will know that I love preparation and planning - the latest I ever started revising for exams were 3 weeks in advance. And that too was meticulously scheduled: I had a 3-week plan of what to study each day.
Sadly, this is not so at Stanford. I'm not sure if it's because I'm getting more lazy or because I'm getting too busy, but I only really started preparing for finals on Friday afternoon. There's just so much material to clear, and even "dead week" - the week just before finals week, which is supposed to be purely for us to study, and when profs aren't supposed to teach new material - isn't really dead because the profs cram all they can into the last few lectures anyway. I had 2 homework sets due on Friday of dead week; supposedly it's not against university policy, but it's certainly unpopular enough that the prof had to specially check it up in anticipation of a riot.
Anyway, I just wanted to write a reminder to myself that even though I'm drowning in work right now, I'm really thankful for the amazing friends I have here.
Thursday was terrible. I woke up early to do a stats revision exercise, and got stuck on a question that I didn't quite understand. I had to leave it undone because I needed to go practice carillon, and my prof had assigned me 3 very hard songs that I'd not been able to get fluent yet. Somehow my music reading ability deteriorates exponentially when I'm tired, and it's really hard to coordinate both hands AND feet and read notes at the same time. The difficulties of carillon playing, sigh, but the bells sound so beautiful!
After that I had a discussion with my philosophy TA about my final paper, about a Platonic dialogue involving very bitchy main characters that take sarcastic snipes at each other any opportunity they get (really, is this the Real Housewives of Ancient Greece or what?). Also my prof has a theory that the entire dialogue is meant to be read as a set of practice problems to test the readers' philosophizing skills: Plato hid fallacious arguments amongst good arguments, and it's basically up to the reader to decide which are fallacious and which are not. Huge tangle, and huge pain in the ass, made worse by Socrates basically being a catty bitch all throughout.
Then I had to rush to dance practice, which is in itself really fun usually. Worked on tango, managed to iron out some kinks, but it wasn't as smooth as I'd hoped it would be. Still, tango is one of the dances I like better; it's something that I can actually
feel, like my piano teacher always tried to make me do for pieces. Never really had any success with that; managed to pretend like I was feeling it, but for dance I don't have to pretend, and it's like I'm really performing with my entire soul.
But then we started practicing foxtrot, which we haven't done in a while, and which is confusing as hell for me. I don't pick up new dances fast - and foxtrot is the newest dance I've learnt. Unfortunately, Solomon really likes it. He was trying to explain the movements and steps to me, except in a really mathematical way which I totally wasn't getting because I suck at math visualization. Even for waltz, I'm never really sure of the angles that I should be turning. I kind of rely on my instinctive feelings for where I should be facing at any time... aka I let my partner turn me. Telling me that I need to turn 135* in a single step is a sure way of making me screw up the step. So as Solomon was counting the tracks where our feet should be moving, I started screwing up more and more and getting increasingly frustrated. Solomon noticed that I was -this- close to flipping out and suggested we finish our practice with quickstep, my usual favorite. But quickstep has similarities to foxtrot, and somehow I felt like I wasn't getting quickstep either :(
Anyway after that very depressing day where I basically understood like 5% of what I was supposed to, I locked myself in my room and forced myself to study some more. But clearly concerned that I was going to slit my wrists or something, Solomon called to make sure I was okay, and offered to listen to my whining if I wanted to, because "partners care for partners". Aw :,) I'm so lucky with partners sigh I keep getting super nice ones! Not that I'm complaining or anything, nice partners are good, and they make you want to get better at dance. I didn't really whine much, because I was so touched (and probably PMSing) that I was pretty much sobbing incoherently, and I tried to put it down to T-Mobile's sketchy reception to hide it heh.
And then at 11pm my phone rang again, and I was like, woah, I'm popular today. It was Chuan Yu, and true to his sketchy grad student nature (hahaha I call him sketchy cos I see him EVERYWHERE) he curtly asked: "Are you in your room? Yes? Open your door now."
I cautiously did, and he stuck his thumb and finger out in the shape of a gun and said "bang." I was just speechless at that point, because he'd somehow managed to get past the card entry system to the dorm, and I wasn't sure why he would come all the way out to the very edge of campus just to play a lame practical joke for me, when he handed me a cup of bubble tea and was like, "nah, for you." So nice omg! And it was good boba from Tea Era also, not like the one from Axe and Palm, which is passable in a pinch, but by no means fantastic.
Speaking of more dead week boba delivery, I somehow accidentally got Solomon hooked onto bubble tea again (previously, he'd eschewed anything with caffeine, because it's just one of those funky things that athletes do), after forcing him to drink some Tpumps. He liked it so much he went to get the exact same flavor (Tangerine lychee pomegranate, guys -- pretty in pink and tastes like rainbows and unicorns) except with green tea instead of black because his soul isn't "black like [mine]". Hmph. Still, it impressed him so much he went to get Sharetea before practice on Saturday, and offered to get me a cup too! So I had 2 good bobas in the span of 3 days, mmm. Bubble tea makes for a happy Vic - I am very easily manipulated by food.
Also, quite possibly the best thing that happened to me this week: I went to the post office to check if Rachel's postcard had arrived, and opened my mailbox to find a mysterious orange envelope addressed to me in a handwriting I didn't recognize.
I opened it up to find a "Happy Birthday!" card, and wondered briefly if it was my aunt who'd sent it to me, since she's the only one I know who's ever given me a birthday card. Then I opened it up, and was simply shocked: it was filled with birthday wishes and drawings from both sides of my extended family, not to mention really touching messages from my mum and dad assuring me that they missed me a lot.
I made it out of the post office, sat down under the orange tree outside, and cried over it for a good 15 minutes. My family's never really been big on birthday celebrations, or tangible expressions of love - we don't write each other cards, and the only time I remember receiving a group card (which takes so much more organization and planning, and people who really love you enough to get signatures from everyone else) was from Rachel and Crystal last year. My dad wrote me a really long message in Chinese, which felt so unfamiliar and homely at the same time. It's interesting, I think, that though my native language is English, and I've grown up speaking English my whole life, when I'm homesick I say "我要回家", not "I want to go home".
And so, that concludes this post on a stressful week. I don't want to remember the stress - in fact, I don't any more, lol, it's been displaced by other worries, but I'll always want to remember the amazing people that I'm so fortunate to have in my life. This is becoming a theme in a lot of my blog posts, but really, wow. I am such a lucky girl to have all these amazing people around me to rely on :,)
