sickness has bad timing

When do you usually get sick? Do you have the feeling that sickness usually doesn’t come at the right time?

I’m quite a healthy person, but I always find myself getting sick by the end of the quarter/semester. Just like now, in the middle of the final weeks, I’m sick again. The worst thing about this is that I don’t recover easily.

I can’t express how much I hate getting sick: instant coughing, the dizziness that last the whole day because of the medicine, the stresses when remembering the tons of things waiting for me to finish, etc.

When I’m writing this blog, I just wasted my whole day resting because the medicine had been keeping me in bed this whole time.

I strongly feel that sickness chooses the time to make me sick. Last week, I finished the busiest week in the quarter. I was so glad I didn’t get sick during that week. I had this perfect plan of getting enough rest and meeting my friends in the long weekend, then doing my papers and studying for my finals. I shouldn’t have trusted my body to be good for at least once, I got sick again last Sunday.

Not to mention about my plan of getting enough rest, sleeping for the rest of the long weekend couldn’t make me better, the sickness just got worse and worse. I was lucky that I didn’t get a fever and were still able to go to class, especially when the last week of class always talk about the finals or it is the due date of final assignments.

Now I just hope all the finals end soon so I can stick on my bed and let my body recover.  

Well, thinking this in a positive way, I can have a healthy body to enjoy summer right after this quarter ends. This year, I hope I can recover before my birthday, which is the weekend right after finals.

homemade sushi roll

As I have difficulty thinking of what to write for this week’s blog, I decided to write about what I had for dinner today.

If you know me personally, I am not much of a cook. It’s not that I don’t know how to cook, it’s just that I don’t feel like cooking most of the time. For anyone who like Japanese style food, or just anyone who don’t mind eating raw fish, homemade sushi may be a good choice for dinner when you want your dinner be ready in 45minutes.

Sushi roll is such an easy dish that the most difficult part of making it is the sushi rice. It’s best to use the fat and round Japanese style rice, but ordinary rice is okay too. To cook it, the ratio of rice and water should be around 1:1.15. Remember to wash the rice before cooking it. Two cups of rice for about two servings.

The most challenging part of making sushi rice is seasoning it. You need rice vinegar, salt and sugar. Once the rice is cooked, transfer the rice into a big bowl for easy stirring. Pour in the rice vinegar first (two cups for about five tablespoons of rice vinegar), stir it thoroughly with a big plastic spoon (metal not preferable since it may react to the vinegar) until the rice become sticky. Next, season the rice with salt and sugar, mix them thoroughly. You may be worried about the pungent smell of rice vinegar, but the smell will be evaporated with the help of the heat.

After you are done with the sushi rice, there is really not much left to do other than dicing and slicing. I usually slice all the fishes I have. For raw fish, please don’t just buy any fish you can find in the supermarket, they may not be fresh enough to be eaten raw. One easy way to buy them is to go to the Japanese style supermarket (or even Korean market, but I personally don’t trust Chinese market with this). Salmon and tuna are two of my favorites and most popular fishes for sushi. Other than the raw fish, I also have baked eel (slice it), avocado (dice it) and cucumber (slice it).

Aside from the sushi rice, you can actually put whatever you like to make the perfect combination of sushi roll for yourself. To eat it, put a seaweed sheet (so called “nori” which can be easily found in any Asian market) on your plate, then put a small amount of sushi rice on top, add in whatever you want and wrap it, dip this messy sushi roll with soy sauce and wasabi. Eat it.

Warning: if you spotted my use of word of “messy”, you should know that this is not the professional way of making sushi roll, but I promise, it taste good (isn’t this all we need after all?)

working hard

I believe everyone has the moment when they feel like they are terribly behind schedule and yet doing nothing to help the situation. We always hear people telling us to always stay ahead of the schedule so we’ll never have to worry about deadline stresses, but how likely is it for us to be able to push ourselves to actually start doing things ahead of time? Almost never for me, not until I was overwhelmed with sadness and stresses a few months ago.

That was the time I started understanding how much worse it is to drown myself into the mixture of negative feelings, so I started to make myself busy with the assignments, readings and reports. I wanted to push myself to work with the deadlines, so it clears up the useless thoughts in my head. Making myself busy has made me forget, but I know that those feelings will run back to me when I stop. However, special thanks to the quarter system that Cal Poly Pomona, I can always find myself something to do for the upcoming deadlines of assignments and exams.

I should be glad that those deadlines have not only filled my time up, they have actually made me learn new things. In order to run away from unwanted feelings, I did not only pick up my assignments but also volunteered to do things in my groups, things I’ve never done before. With the promise I made to myself of not ruining everything, the deadline, and the whole lot of things to learn before I can start doing the actual work, I had not make myself more useful in my early adulthood.

Now, this may sound like it is good to keep myself busy since I am learning new things and making myself useful, but I know why I am working so hard. I would hate to stop being busy because it means that I’ll have to face what I need to face. But for now, I think I’ll overwhelm myself with work and leave those problems

The Woman

Like many other blogs I saw this week, I am going to talk about Mother’s Day. This is my third Mother’s Day that I am distanced from my mother.  Some say Mother’s Day should not be a day for celebration since everyday should be a Mother’s Day. I agree with that. However, Mother’s Day is still very important because it is a day to remind people not talk their mothers’ love for granted and to remind people to thank their mothers.

Thinking of being thankful to my mother, I am always wondering what makes a good daughter. Is it the time I spend with my parents? Is it how much I can fulfill my parents’ wishes? Or is it a high GPA? I am not good at any one of those. If people are always thinking that we live our own lives, then why should I be thankful for jus this woman who gave birth to me? I am not sure of the answer, but I believe what makes a mother is not plainly the fact that she gave birth to me. A mother becomes a mother though years. She is just human. She makes mistakes, but she is always there trying to correct them and to be a better mother day by day. The mistakes she make, sometimes the wrong effort she tries to change my perspectives, are always forgivable because I can feel her love being so pure and true. At this moment, I don’t think I am good enough to be her daughter, at least not the Crystal who spends Mother’s Day in a different country and focuses a lot on her own work. However, I should believe myself to be a better daughter day by day just like how my mother becomes a better mother though time.

She is the woman, and she is the woman who has become my mother.  

I am the girl, and I am still learning to be a daughter.

Even when I am not doing a great job, I wish she can look forward for a better daughter. Happy Mother’s Day!

listener

I always want to be a good friend, so I always try my best when someone needs me. From time to time, some friends find me and talk about their problems, and I always want to accompany them. However, I had had a long time trouble with how to be a good listener.

People always have problem with dealing the relationship of tellers and listeners. I can’t exactly remember how many times I ended up arguing with my friends because I wanted to help them while they just wanted someone to listen to them. I got really frustrated why they got mad when I thought I was doing my part. The problem led me to the understanding of the actual role of a listener. People, just like the old me, thought their friends find them to talk about their worries and anxieties actually want some advices to solve their problems. However, they don’t.

In order for me to understand that role, I put myself in the view of the teller. I understand that when I actually find someone to talk about my problems, part of me was just talking to myself and let myself understand what are in my mind. Deep under me, I know what I believe and what I want, and so I don’t really want the listener to tell me what to do for the best of everything and everyone. Of course, there are times when I burst into tears because my listener gave me suggestions which I thought they are good, but the reason I cried was because he or she was speaking my mind. Therefore, the job of the listener is just, literally, to listen or maybe speak a little bit of what the teller has in mind.

So if someone ever wonders what he or she should do to stop the conflicts, what takes to make things go smoothly is just to listen and speak when it’s appropriate.

2012

This year is 2012. What do you think of about 2012? You may be a believer, thinking that the world will end by the end of this year; or you may be a nonbeliever, believing that things will go peacefully and enter 2013. I do not deny that I used to be scared of 2012, anxious about what will happen to me when the world ends. However, the death of my previous piano teacher makes me think of 2012 differently.

At the end of 2011, I went back to the city where I lived for 17 years before I came to US: Macao. 17 years is definitely not a short period of time. By this time, I spent around 12 years learning piano, in which I had the same teacher for over 10 years. Her name was Cheong, and I used to describe her with three words: stubborn, tough, and single. Even when she carried these unattractive characters, she lived her life teaching piano, and piano was the only thing she could not give away. Most importantly, she was a piano teacher who never gave up on untalented and lazy students like me. In the past few years, her life was tough as she was fighting against cancer. However, I heard that she became better last year and started her piano classes again. About a week before I came back to US for school, I called her wishing I to meet her before I left, but she told me she had to leave country for a while and by the time she was back, I would have left already. I promised to schedule earlier next time I go back to Macao. However, a few days after I returned to US, my mother called me informing me that Miss Cheong had passed away.

Everything stopped at that moment, all the promises were gone, and all the memories flooded my brain. I can’t really remember when I stopped crying and started soaking myself in regrets, guiltiness, and deep thoughts. At the end, I came up with the question of whether she had any regrets the time she passed away. I know I would never get the true answer, but I came up with “no” basing on the long time I spent with her. Even when I used to think that she lived a boring life when I was small, she never regretted for being a full time piano teach and spending the rest of her personal time teaching students at home. To me, she never spent a day thinking how her life could be better off; she loved what she did and put all her heart in it. Therefore, at least the Miss Cheong I knew would have no regrets by the time she left.

This brought me back to my original anxiety of the end the world. We all know that we will die one day, and we will always have things we haven’t do when we reach the exit of our lives, so what more can we do other than living our lives without making ourselves regret by the end of the day? Even when 2012 is really the end of the world, should your worry of death worth spending more time than your living without regret?

The So Called Coolest Job Ever

I had heard more than once from my friends saying how they wish they could be a designer, which is the coolest job ever. To them, designer is the job that has all kinds of flexibility and freedom as long as they can come up with new designs. In which, new designs are only about their creativity and designers always have a lot of innovative ideas in their minds. To live a designer life, they should travel a lot and should be fastidious on places they live, food they eat, and everything they purchase.

You may be wondering why I am even talking about designers when I’m majoring in communication. Unfortunately, I live with my sister who is a student of Art Center College of Design, which to me is a school built to drain people’s money. Living with her makes it impossible for me not to know the truth behind this fascinating profession.

Not to mention the unenjoyable researches she has to go through before she can actually start designing, designing is absolutely ten times more time consuming people can imagine. The days she stayed up until 4 a.m. for her work triples the days she can sleep before 1 a.m. About people’s imagination of flexibility and creativity, it is true that designers much have a certain level of creativity, but their creativity is always suppressed by reality limitations such as costs, clients, and market. With all these limitations, designer can hardly be a job of flexibility and freedom. When it is true that designers in general are fastidious of their material lives, only a small amount of designers are able to live luxury lives with a small amount of work, who are the very experienced designers that built their success for years. It is important to mention that before anyone can turns out to be one of the bests, they have start from the lowest, from nothing.

I believe people are in the wrong direction when thinking that they want to find a job that doesn’t require much work, each occupation has its own difficulties. Therefore, finding the things they want to do should be the most important thing they decide on.

Behind the Clouds

Have you ever imagined what’s behind the cloud? Especially behind those thick clouds which look like they are trying to hide something from people’s naked eyes.

I used to be a kid full of unrealistic imaginations. However, as I grow older, I suppressed my imaginations in order to become a mature person. It is sad to mention that I gave away my rich imaginations to become an ordinary and boring adult. It wasn’t until I saw the clouds on the sunny sky that I remember my childhood imagination.

I used to think that there are big cities behind those clouds where people actually live there.  Animals and plants there are different from those we see on the land: they are the cities of fantasy. Throughout centuries, we who live on the land know nothing about them, but they who lived in the sky have been watching us and know all about us. Not being disturbed by us, they keep their own culture, architectures, and fashion. Also, unlike us, they embrace the nature and so the nature protects them. Their cities are located behind chunks and chunks of thick clouds and are protected by strong wind surrounding their cities, so everything that get close to them are destroyed. As the nature protects them from anyone or anything that might disturb them, they go on with their peaceful lives in the clouded sky.

As I have been a person who believes in no fantasy about life, I always feel that my mental age is 10 years older than I really am. However, to have this kind of unrealistic imagination makes me feel young again. People may think imaginations are childish, but isn’t this a great way to escape from this stressful and tiring reality for a while? More importantly, if imagination does make one mentally young again, no one should ever give up imagining as youth makes life much more energetic.

“We Found Love” and “Just The Way You Are”

I don’t have the habit of playing my iPod when I drive, so I turn on the radio every time I get in my car. Since I only look for some entertainment while driving so it is not as boring, I feel fine with the radio playing any kind of song. All I do is switching between channels that basically play the songs from the same song bank.

Just like any other day with morning class, I jumped in my car and rush out this Tuesday since I only had about half an hour left before class starts. At that time, the world around me was rushing. Being one of the people in a hurry and having the radio turned on in their cars, I drove angrily just like the majority of drivers around me.

I was not in a good mood for hurrying to school right after I woke up, and the radio was not helping by playing “We Found Love”:

“We found love in a hopeless place
 we found love in a hopeless place
 we found love in a hopeless place …”

Stop it! Who cares about where you found your love! (Switching the channel at the same time)

“Boom, badoom, boom
 boom, badoom, boom, he got that super bass
 boom, badoom, boom …”

What does that “boom, badoom, boom” even means! (Switching the channel again)

“I don’t want clever conversation
 I never want to work that hard
 I just want someone that I can talk to
 I want you just the way you are…”

I need to know that you will always be/the same old someone that I knew/…

I can’t express how much better I felt when “Just the Way You Are” was played while I was just trying to find a less annoying song. I was glad that I could finally listen to a song that doesn’t repeat the same sentence for one-third of the song, doesn’t have the strong bass, and doesn’t have someone rapping after every single melody.

Listening to and singing along with one of my childhood favorites made me feel like the world had finally settle down with a peaceful pace and the drivers weren’t as angry as they were a few minutes ago.

Driving safely yet exceeding the speed limit, I arrived school on time and had my day started with a beautiful song in my head.