09.04.01
late for class.

09.05.01
third week into the semester and i have bought 0 books. i don't think i need to buy them as long as i go to classes regularly. so i guess i should go to classes then.

i'm writing less and less in my journal because i don't have online connection in my apt and because school is boring and uneventful. i went to a kusa meeting tonight and i have to say, this must be the year of the fobs.
i would never date a fob. it's not the broken english or even their taste for bright sweatshirts that have logos like "together we be happy and dance". it's something about the "i am korean man and if you are a skinny korean girl i don't care how old you are, i keep staring at you, hehe."
actually, that's just the eebie jeebie feeling i got from this one fob who was 25yrs old when i was a freshman. he's still a math major and his english hasn't gotten any better but that is okay because anyone who has been studying undergraduate math for 7 years must be very smart.

lin is nice. she's nice.

09.10.01
jeez louise. i have extended cable. i'm really into movie channels like starz and ifc that show movies without commercial interruption. once i turn on the tube, i have to sit through at least two movies.

sare's cell phone minute tracking habits remind me of a voice stream anytime minutes commercial. there's a kissing couple and the guy's lip ring gets stuck in his girlfriend's braces, but he refuses to call for help until 8pm because he ran out of daytime minutes. i bet she'd cut me short if i called her up to tell her that someone accidently amputated my left foot.

09.11.01
jen emailed me this morning saying that she could clearly see the fire from 27th and 6th. i didn't know what she was talking about until i read the nyt online. the headlines were unbelievable. wtc buildings are no longer there. went home and watched the news for few hours while trying to reach friends who are in the city. thank god they're all ok.

this is the most disturbing event i've seen in my life. right there in manhattan just hits too close.
people here seem so removed. i suppose since they are mostly from p.a. my roommate didn't know where the twin towers were. so i pointed to the large mirror in my living room with the etching of the manhattan skyline. i wonder if the mirrors are going to be removed next year when new tenants come in.

jen called and told me how eerie the city is now. the streets are completely empty and quiet.

09.13.01
this is an email i recieved from my yoga instructor yesteray:

"I wanted to let you know what I plan to do in yoga class today. Yoga provides us with the framework to use our body/mind to support our spirit during the most unthinkable crises. In support of this tradition, I would like us to meet together today at 2:30 in 106 White. I will collect assignments and then I invite us to join together in a brief (5-10 minute) period of silent meditation. I feel that we can more authetically honor the spirit of yoga by sharing these moments together as a community rather than attempting to do a "normal" class of yoga postures. Therefore you won't need to change into your '"yoga clothes" today."

roite roite.

so i haven't been able to sleep much. i can see those burning towers when i close my eyes. kept thinking about the people trapped in the wreckage. last night i called joe who i found absolutely depressing to talk to. note to self: don't talk to joe when feeling already disturbed and/ before going to bed, as he will make comments such as, "i'm reminded of the sixth sense. you know, 'i see dead people'." jerk.

i'm not going to watch the news anymore.

09.14.01
but i watched the news anyway. suzie had guests over for dinner last night. as soon as they left, we practically lunged at the tv with our index fingers extended (we have no remote) and our eyes were glued for a good 2 hours.
i got pretty depressed after watching an interview with the ceo of canter fitzgerald. they worked on the top floors of the north tower. after the first plane hit, the people in the office knew chances were slim. approximately 700 employees were in the office at the time. that morning the ceo took his kid to her first day of school and was late to work.

the local news stations are completely ludicrous. channel 6 news had a segment called "people talk" or something like that where locals call in and express how they *feel*. so with rural p.a. accents they called in, the good folk of centre county, and gave the public a piece of their mind:
"what i don't understand is why we gotta put more americans in danger by sending them to fight in foreign soil. i'd say, just send a couple of missiles over there, then send a couple more, and a few more of em' and get the whole thing over with!"
"this is just so sad. so sad. but we're going to find who did this, and we are going to destroy them."

i want to go home soon. my one on one with the bible study leader was kind of awkward. i don't know her very well. she kept asking me how i was doing and so on but i guess i didn't find it necessary to open up to her. i felt kind of bad though.

09.16.01
jen took that lovely picture of me with the wooden arm, which i artfully smuggled from work this past summer. pretty fabulous.

emi said that some guests at the hotel (sheraton ny) asked her if the security guards and their dobermans were looking out for a drug bust.

i was in philly last night, helping out at a friend's restaurant. the place is absolutely chinese-glam with "everything must be draped in red" as a rule-of- thumb. there were two wedding receptions going on at the same time, on the same floor, the two parties separated by a couple of 3-paneled wooden screens. one party was cambodian and the other thai. they both hired bands with female singers so that when one band stopped playing, people could clearly hear relatively similar kind of singing from the other side, although in a different language. the bands were horrible. thai song lyrics seem to consist of one or two words being sung repeatedly. (i.e. rhom rhom rhom rhom rhom~ rhom rhom rhom rhom rhom~ rhom rhom~ etc).

there were ten main courses and we had to walk out in a line with each dish, clad in black vest and bow tie. i once quit a job as usher at the bryce jordan center *before* i actually started working because they told me that i would be required to wear a vest and bow tie.
before the guests arrived, we were informed that special music would be playing when we enter the room with the food. thank goodness this did not happen.
i worked on the cambodian party side and the men were pretty drunk by the third dish. small, dark men stopped adding tonic to their half-full tumblers of hennessy and a good many of them, both men and women, made their way to the dance floor. most of them danced pretty badly. they looked better doing what appeared to be "the cambodian dance": walking around in connected circle with hands moving kind of like the rotating-flowering hands of hula dancers.

i don't think i ever worked so hard in my life. i can't believe they have receptions like that every weekend. cindy and her sisters work with inhuman speed. jane, the youngest can scoop food onto 20 plates in less than 10 seconds. we got back to cindy's house around 2am, drank tea, ate fruit, and went to bed with aching arms and feet. in the morning, they ached more.

i'm still full from the unlimited dim sum we ate this afternoon.

09.17.01
in poli-soc today, we had to stand and hold hands in a circle in a moment of silence before starting class . did it again at the end of class. there is a person in my class who somehow manages to manipulate *every* discussion we have into a race issue, particularly about black-white relations. today it just made me want to lash out. jeez louise, what would he live for if black and white people actually got along?

i had to question why all this had to happen under the watchful eyes of god. i don't know. religion doesn't explain everything. lately it seems to explain little. but do i really think that i love people more than god?

we live in denial of death. how many religions out there embrace death? those terrorists believed they were going to heaven by doing what they did.

people are afraid to let go of this anger. i suppose after anger there's all that pain to work with. extremely difficult to wrap oneself around pain.

wow. someone other than jen, joe, or sare signed my guestbook.

i chatted with sophomore girls today. we talked about pregnancy and plastic surgery. natural birth is incredibly painful as women usually go into labor for at least 4 hours however grace informed me that the cut from a c-section hurts for approximately 10 days. then topic drifted into, "so and so had her eyes done". apparently, the common excuse used by girls who had eye-crease surgery is, "my eye lashes grew downward and poked into eyes, so i *had* to get the surgery." it's horrible. when korean girls turn 17, their eyelashes start growing in the wrong direction.

bad teeth are a turnoff. i don't think i would be attracted to a guy with bad teeth. there's this guy i know who has an unusually wide gap between his two front teeth. and there's a girl who thinks he's cute. so i think i might make some arrangements.

09.20.01
wendy has arrived. she's a lush just like me.

my soc-stat class just sucks. i hate it very much. i'm always writhing in my seat, shaking my leg, looking at my watch, taking deep breaths. it does not help that the professor looks like satan. he's a cross between phil zambardo and al pacino. the most perfect combination for an evil looking person.
i didn't know my watch was 5 minutes fast, so i whispered to my classmate that it was time to get outta there. he informed me that we still had 5 minutes left. satan heard our conversation and looked straight at me and told me not to get my hopes up. eeeeevil.

are there any eccentric billionaires out there whose dream is to work as a pizza delivery boy?

ran into an ex from sophomore year. he looked the same. it felt kind of embarassing for some reason. maybe because i wasn't such a nice girlfriend to him. in any case, it has been years and he was very nice. he did point out to me though, during the brief conversation, that he has a girlfriend.

asian women can drive.

09.23.01
why are there so many flies in the pattee library computer lab?

sometimes the yoga instructor asks a member of the class to demonstrate a certain position. once, this very thin asian girl with large head was called on to do the triangle position. the instructor told the girl that she ought to control her movements because she was so flexible. then she called her gumby.

i retrieved some deleted files from my computer last night and stayed up till 6am cleaning them up because the text was buried between so much coding. i found some really good emails from years ago. i missed church because i overslept. makes me feel all wrong. i watched a memorial this morning and couldn't stop crying when bette midler sang "wind beneath my wings" to the audience, many of them still holding up posters that said, "please contact... if you find..."

i hung out with kdphi sisters thursday night. we ate wings and drank beer. one of the sisters thought the waiter was cute. i thought he looked like will farell from snl. so after she left, kim got the waiter's number for her. he described himself as being "very single". ew.

09.24.01
it is raining like mad today. luckily i still have joe's umbrella, which he had gallantly let me borrow about three months ago. it's actually quite nice with more than your typical automatic-umbrella features. while walking to class today in the pouring rain, gripping the handle of umbrella, my thumb accidently pressed the button. this caused the damned thing to automatically close. my head got completely drenched, however since this discovery i have been closing the umbrella dramatically before entering buildings, getting on the bus, etc. i bet people are thinking, "wow, what a fabulous umbrella."

there are many asian people here at the library. and they're all fobs.

i found someone's wallet in the street today. it was laying there in the middle of the street, getting drenched in the rain. cars passed over it, people actually looked at it as they walked by but no one picked it up. so i took it upon myself to save poor wallet. according to the california driver's license i found inside, the wallet belongs to a 'brain a. gordon', although his student id has him down as a 'brian'.

fact: i have gradually gained weight in the past year. of the 10+ pairs of jeans i have, i only wear one. and now even that has torn at the knees. what am i to do? the other jeans are too tight and hoochie. i don't want to buy larger sizes because that will mean that i am accecpting the bigger me. but if i buy my regular size i'll have to lose weight before i can wear it, and who knows when that'll happen? :(

the mysterious anon in my guestbook sounds like jerry. the usage of words "perhaps" and "fellow" led me to this conclusion.

09.25.01
so i think you guys (jen, joe, sare, anon, and pak) should leave messages in trottelheim so i can respond.

v. good looking guy sitting across from me. looks like george clooney/ j.crew model. oh... he just left.

i often wear strange things like a thick necklace made of shiny plastic circles, a big purple silk flower tied to my hair, snake skin shoes with short pants, a shirt with a big glittery cat in the front. actually, i am wearing all of above mentioned items today. no one can stop me now.

while traveling in germany, jen mentioned how j-lo's ears stick out too much. so sometmes i would pull my hair back into a bun at the nape of my neck, press my ears out and sing, "play, come on dj play that song, play it all night loooong. just turn it up and turn me on."

i have red rubber gloves just like faye wong's.

09.27.01
sometimes i just dislike all things and most people- but i assure you four people who read my journal regularly- i like yous.

two nights ago i had a dream that my father completely lost his mind. i was chasing him down a street, reminding him of the time we did this and that... eventually he became so aggravated that he pushed me away. in the dream i cried and cried like ben stiller but when i woke up, i was surprised to see that i was actually crying.

poeks: yo i saw a girl last night that looked just like paul
Lin is NICE: WHAT?
Lin is NICE: no way
poeks: yesh
Lin is NICE: that's gross!
Lin is NICE: ppl say i look like paul but i think they must be reeetaded
poeks: i was like that girl kind of looks like linda.
poeks: then i was like you know, now that i think about it
poeks: that girl looks like paul, *just* like paul
Lin is NICE: hahahahaha
Lin is NICE: maybe it was paul in drag
poeks: maybies