1. I got into aKDPhi!!!!!

My AASibfam (Asian American Sibling Family- at the start of the year, the Asian American student association will match a bunch of freshmen with upperclassmen to form a SibFam, which is just a nice community which you can look to for help and advice and Asian food) is entirely Greek, with all the girls coming from aKDPhi and the guys coming from LPhiE. Both are Asian American interest Greek organizations, and are affliated to each other, so I guess that's how all my bigs decided to get together and foster a bunch of littlesibs. 

Anyway they'd always been super nice and caring, not in a cheesy love-hugs-rainbows-unicorns kind of way, but sometime more... tangible? They've got each others' backs, in other words, and were always ready to do the same for their littles (i.e. Us poor list freshies who were craving Asian food badly). So that got me wondering in Greek life- if that was the kind of people that Asian Greek life turned out, it was the kind of community I wanted to join. So I spoke a lot to my bigsibs, Tracy and Mica, who were both members of aKDPhi. And when it was time to rush for sororities, I decided to go on out and give it a try. 

There is no analogue of rush in Singaporean culture. During rush, you hang out with a bunch of sisters from the sorority and talk to them, getting to know the sorority's community better. At the same time, they try to get to know you better, and decide if you're a good fit for the sorority. Inter-sorority council rush (the non-Asian Greek organizations, and IMO the slightly more party ones, like the ones you see in American college dramas) is supposedly way more intense- girls will primp the hell out of themselves just to impress the sisters and get them to like you. At the end of rush, if the sisters of the sorority decide that they like you, you are extended a bid, which means that they're inviting you to join them. I don't think the girls rushing for aKDPhi primped a lot. I did try to look extra good- mascara, eyeliner, actually Putting In Effort instead of just wearing turtlenecks and jeans out, but it was something that I'd been planning to do eventually someday. Sorority rush was just a good time for me to start getting into the habit. 

My mum likes to say that there aren't any ugly people, only lazy people. (Or is it Rachel who said that? Maybe both) For a large part of my life, I've been lazy as hell- believing that inner beauty can help to cover up external failings. It is true to a certain extent, I suppose, and who you are on the inside is what determines whether your friendships and relationships will last or just be painfully shallow. But it's not an either-or choice: you can look good and be a great person at the same time, and that's what many of the girls in aKDPhi are. So why focus only on being a nice person? Both are important. Plus, there's a certain boost of confidence that you get when you try to look good, which is infective and improves your personality a lot. 

Rush was super exhausting though. Again, I have never been one for meeting tons of new people, and rush forces you to not only meet new people, but rapid-fire bond with them. aKDPhi rush wasn't too bad; I felt like I clicked with a lot of the girls there, and it was okay to talk about anything from boys to clothes to the meaning of life and the Stanford experience, so I knew I really really wanted to join aKDPhi - by the second night of rush (it's a weeklong thing - both aKDPhi and SYZ, which is another Asian sorority, were having their rush events at the same time and I went to both) I knew which one was the one for me, and I got super worried about whether they would like me back :(

The night that bids were supposed to come out, I bugged my bigsib Tracy all day panicking (ahem... some things don't change), and at 10pm, when I still hadn't heard from them, I assumed the worst and sent sad fb messages to her. I was walking home from dance prac when she called, and sounded all solemn, and said: "Hey little... I just wanted to thank you so much for coming out to rush and meeting all my sisters... and I'm really glad you had a good time." Inside I was like "ohshitohshitohshit" and I thought that I hadn't made it in, and that this was going to be a majorly awkward conversation because she knew how much I wanted to join aKDPhi, like since the start of the year, and I wouldn't be able to casually brush it off with a "uh, oh, okay, thanks anyway!" because I would just burst into tears.

And then she continued: "Unfortunately...", and I was literally on the verge of tears, and wondering how I was going to keep my voice steady and pretend to be cool with it. "Unfortunately... WE ARE RIGHT OUTSIDE YOUR ROOM RIGHT NOW!!!!!!!!!!"

Except it really did turn out to be unfortunate, because I was trudging back from dance practice, and was super tired, but upon hearing that I was so excited I screamed really loudly and ran all the way back from Roble to FroSoCo. Lol, aKDPhi is the only thing that I am willing to run for :P I met my bigs and future sisters outside my room, and there was a lot of screaming and hugging and they gave me a beautiful iris flower, which is the flower of our sorority. I accepted my bid within like 10 mins of being given it, but there was never any question about whether or not I'd accept, lol.

So now, I'm just waiting to find out who the rest of my pledge class will be. I was so excited that I painted my nails in aKDPhi colors (purple and white French manicure with glitter, because I can't resist glitter ever) the very next day.

2. Preparing for Cardinal Classic

Another ballroom competition is coming up, and this will be Solomon's and my last competition as newcomers. After this, we'll no longer be little babies and will have grown up to compete in Bronze and Silver! I'm really excited, but also scared, because this will be the last competition where we are more or less prepared to compete at our competition level. After that, it's back down to the dregs and we'll have to work harder to pull ourselves up again.

We've been training hard for Cardinal, and because we're now more aware of what we're doing we have more things to work on. Previously we used to practice very shallow things, like just doing our routine 500 times over because we had no clue how we could improve. Now, we have more technique theory and we know what we need to work on! The list of things we need to improve on is ever-expanding, and in a sense that's exciting too.

Solomon is also a great partner because before practice on Thursday, he suddenly called me and was like "Hey Victoria, I'm at Tpumps and there is no line. Do you want anything?" DO I EVER NOT WANT TPUMPS??  Of course I said yes, and he bought me a large cup of bubble tea, which was larger than I expected. Supersize me, America. It's also funny because he was accused by Sidney of ruining the market for leaders, and raising expectations super high (:P) but Sidney was the one who taught leads to be nice to their follows in the first place! I still remember watching Gene give Vivian a massage, and Sidney telling a bunch of us that leads should be nice to their follows like that, and that he always brings chocolate for Jamie for their practice sessions. Everytime things don't work out and they start to get pissed at each other, they go eat chocolate and come back feeling, which is one of the sweetest things I've heard. It's actually really good relationship/marriage theory too! I could write an entire blogpost about how dancing is totally analogous to being in a relationship, and is thus super good practice for it, but again this post is long and sprawling already so I'll leave it to another time.

Thursday's practice was super useful too, because we had office hours with a really good guest dancer - one of Jamie's dancer friends, and intriguingly, Solomon's ex-colleague. There is a strangely large number of ballroom dancers who work at Oracle - I think a good third of the Stanford team does, or did at some point. Either that, or the ballroom dancers at Oracle are all part of the Stanford team. He was amazing - could tell us what we were doing wrong just by watching us dance, and how to correct it. He watched us dance our routine once through, thought for awhile, and gave his judgment: "Okay, well, there are so many things wrong that I don't know where to begin, but considering that all these things will take you years to fix, I'd say you're pretty good overall." In other words, we're done with all the low-hanging fruit of technique improvement, and all that's left is stuff and technique refinement that will require a lot more practice and experience and body control. Which is kind of a good thing, but also kind of a bad thing because we have such a far road to go. There was an awkward silence as Solomon and I looked at each other and tried to decide whether or not to high five each other, but we went with a half-smile and questioning "Yay?" instead.

Yup. Thus is the life of a dancer. Always improving, never reaching perfection. But for our last-ever newcomer comp, I hope we look good enough as the babies in ballroom dancing that we really are, haha.

At some point in the discussion (at many points actually) I insulted him and he'd look at me, open his mouth to say something, and then close it and sigh and look away. After the 3rd or 4th time this happened I started to get really curious about this quirk of his and poked him until he told me why:

"It's just that you... look like an adorable dog. Everytime you say something naughty I feel like smacking you but then I look at your puppy-eyes face and then I start feeling bad."

Hahahaha oh my god too funny. 

So I landed at JFK at 3pm, which wasn't that big a deal. The flight was okay, except that there was no proper food (seriously, Delta? You're not a budget airline, are you??) but I managed to charm my way into getting 2 packets of peanuts instead of one. Yay me. These are the renowned manipulative powers that Chuan Yu is convinced I have. 

I'd left 3 hours to get from JFK to Port Authority Bus Terminal, where I was supposed to catch a bus from New York to Northampton at 6pm. I'd checked the travelling time, and according to Google Maps, the bus terminal is a 30 min drive away from JFK. Eh, plenty of time, I thought. Wrong, WRONG WRONG WRONG. I waited an hour in line for Supershuttle to process my reservation, another half an hour for the shuttle to arrive, and then watched in horror as the clock ticked down towards 6pm and we were still happily navigating the streets of New York. At 5:30pm, I asked the driver if we were ever going to make it there before 6pm, and he thought for awhile, and said "Nope." I nearly had a panic attack, and convinced him to drop me off near the terminal so that I could either walk or catch a cab. So that was my first glimpse of Times Square - running through masses and masses of people, dragging 2 luggages behind me, probably hitting a lot of people on the ankle. Finally I managed to hail a cab, but as luck would have it, the only cab that was willing to stop for me was an executive limo that charged me $25 for a 10 min ride (probably got scalped, but ugh I had to catch that bus!!!!), and I made it onto the bus to Northampton with minutes to spare.

Crystal picked me up from Northampton, and we had this excited-awkward-at-arms-length-stiff-upper-lip reunion: "OMG I'M SO EXCITED TO SEE YOU I'D TOTALLY HUG YOU but uh, it's awkward. Yeah." It was so awesome to see her again, and it's true what they say about good friends - you can pick up talking to them after quite awhile and it's like you guys never spent any time apart. We went back to her dorm, had a picnic of instant noodles and Meltykiss chocolate, and spent hours catching up and discovering how freakishly our lives had proceeded in parallel. For example, we both have the same brand of waterbottle, we use the same shampoo, we both even have bruises on our toes in the SAME SPOT, and we both independently chose to wear the same shirt as pajamas that night! Gosh, we are twins indeed! Quoth Crystal: "Umm, distance makes us grow... more identical?!" 

Northampton is pretty and very hipster indeed. We spent a day exploring downtown (or rather, I explored while Crystal brought me around), and one thing that's great about Northampton is that everything is within walking distance. Not like California, where you have to drive to get anywhere decent. Plus there was a bubble tea shop (with good bubble tea too!) in downtown Northampton. So jealous, ugh, but it's probably a good thing because if there were good bubble tea within walking distance of Stanford I would be probably be there every. Single. Day. I got bubble tea from the same franchise the very next day at Amherst too, lol. We also explored the Smith Museum of Art, which was less weird than I thought (art museums have the potential to be extremely weird, and also filled with all sorts of awkward feminist art, which usually involves women sitting around naked while being slapped with meat or having flour poured on them or something like that, and being a strongly feminist school, I had strongly suspected Smith's art museum to be filled with the latter), except for 2 canvases that were covered in black paint and white paint respectively. We also visited their Botanical Gardens, which were really just a collection of greenhouses with various plants stuffed inside. It isn't the season for flowers, so apart from one corridor of pretty flowers, everything else inside was just leaves in various shapes and sizes.

There was one intriguing room in the Botanic Gardens, though - the tropical rainforest room! We walked in and were blasted with humidity and heat, so much so that I had trouble breathing. And then we promptly started complaining, because it's a very Singaporean Pavlovian response: up the humidity and up the heat, and we immediately start complaining about the weather. My accent even started to come back in full force, which Crystal noticed when I proclaimed excitedly: "Eh, look, got MARH-NEE PLANT". Interesting... I wonder if accents are triggered by environmental factors!

We also had a half day trip to Amherst, which was "freezing ass cold" - quoting a crazy man who was on the bus back with us, who repeated that loudly, multiple times, and to no one in particular - and Crystal left her backpack there after dinner. So we made a panicked trip back at 10:45pm, and had a long HTHT on the bus ride there and back. I'm really glad to have someone who actually understands what kinds of strain the international student experiences, mainly in terms of identity crises. No one else understands the special place that the Singaporean accent holds in our hearts, and I could write an entire long whiny post on it (and perhaps, I will, later). 

After that, I travelled back to New York, and hung around with Shrub and his roommate Johnny, who is a Korean with the most charming British accent ever. New York too is easy to get around - convenient subway (but $2.50 per ride, wtf?!) and stuff generally being within walking distance too. The first night, I took the subway to the Empire State Building myself, and then walked back to Madison Square Garden to get Shake Shack (on Sidney/Jamie's recommendation) before subwaying back to Shrub's dorm. Shrub and Johnny hadn't had dinner, so they got food and we all had a nice picnic on the floor of their room, listening to "music" like "#SELFIE", and songs by an artiste whose name Shrub found highly amusing: "B-Ju". It was nice hearing British English again (Johnny: "I'm not a fan of the monarchy, but the queen has this quote that I find very amusing: 'There is no such thing as British English and American English. There is English, and there are mistakes.'") and the three of us British colony people had lots of fun laughing at that. 

New York has lots of good food, and good bubble tea too. I did a lot of touristy things, like going to see the Statue of Liberty (seriously though, she is an awe-inspiring sight to behold, especially from the sea) and Times Square and Wall Street and Chinatown. Shrub and I watched a musical, Bullets over Broadway, which was technically still in preview and hadn't opened officially yet. It was so awesome! I love Broadway dancing - the costumes are almost as blingy as ballroom ones (and less tacky at times!) and the dancers are proficient in EVERYTHING, from ballet to tap to Charleston, etc. I'd actually really like to be a Broadway dancer, lol, but you'd probably have to start training from super young. Still, you ain't seen nothin' till you've seen a Broadway performer dressed as a Mafia member perform double pirouettes on stage while singing. 

Getting back from New York was another harrowing experience. I'd been scarred by my previous experience with Supershuttle, but the price difference ($30) between getting a Supershuttle and hailing a cab to get to the airport was significant enough for me to try Supershuttle again. I'd booked a shuttle for 3:30pm, but I waited until 4pm and no shuttle had arrived. After calling them, they told me that someone'd bumped up my pick up time to 4pm but had forgotten to tell me. At 4:30pm, with no shuttle in sight, I called again and they told me that the driver couldn't pick me up anymore, and that I should take a cab to the airport. Luckily Johnny had waited with me, and he helped me hail a cab and put my luggage in and speak to the driver; I don't know what I'd have done otherwise- probably panicked and had a heart attack - and he even checked to make sure I had enough money to take a cab!! So nice, gosh. Because of the traffic, I only got to the airport at 6pm (my flight was at 7pm), and had my bags checked late. That wasn't even the worst; the line to get through security was super long, and there were about a few hundred people in line. Desperate, I put on my best sad-lost-damsel-in-distress face and asked the security officer, "Sir, my plane is at 7pm... do you think this line is going to clear in time??" He thought for awhile, and said, "nope," bringing back terrible memories of the first Supershuttle trip. But then he conspiratorially leant down close to me, pointed out a group of tourists very near the front of the queue, and said, "Follow that group. Act like you own it." 

I cleared customs in 10 min ;) 

And then after another 6h flight, I was back in warm California, where the night breeze is nothing more than a tickle. I took full advantage of my New York-thickened skin to dress up in light summer dresses and jackets the next day, but unfortunately by the following day my skin was back to its California thinness and I couldn't go anywhere without a warm coat.