Hospital

So I've been sleeping with this silence in my mind And all I see scares me And no one knows it, but she, she saved me. So I've been sleeping with this silence in my brain Awakening here everyday in this god damn place I won't wait here anymore. It's still not quite the way it was But you promised me this is love to stay Watch the hospital that's Just across the street From your apartment balcony I'll never ever leave there I'll never leave.

Oh, no one is watching now Sing like you just might drown But always come back here 'Cause I never got to see you once more, no I guess that's all I wanted Yeah, I guess that's all I needed. Now look, you've made a fool out of love When all we want is to be enough When all we want is to feel enough.
It's still not quite the way it was But you promised me this is love to stay Watch the hospital that's Just across the street From your apartment balcony I'll never ever leave there I'll never leave. Watch the hospital that's just across the street (It's still not quite the way it was) From your apartment balcony (But you promised me this is love to stay)

I'll never ever leave there
I'll stay

-----------------------------
("Hospital" by Lydia)
Currently the song that I've been listening to over and over as I slog through my calc homework/

It's Funny

I've never been worried about making a tennis team in my entire life.

Until today.

//edit//

I MADE THE TEAM!

No, I did not make the Duke Varsity Women's Tennis team, which won the NCAA tournament last season. I made the Women's Club Tennis team, which is still a pretty competitive team, just a notch below the Varsity team. There were probably thirty or so girls who tried out today -- and from what I could discern from the e-mail, only 11 were admitted to the competitive team (MY TEAM -- the rest are kind of like Junior Varsity). And apparently, we travel around the country (?) for competitions. :O

But now I am sad that I was not in California this weekend. Otherwise, I would have totally gone to watch Silversun Pickups perform this weekend at Outside Lands Music Festival. Boo.

On another note, I woke up one morning a few days ago to find 10 review alerts from fictionpress in my inbox. That's right, TEN. I was so happy/ashamed -- happy that there are people out there who are still reading my dormant story, ashamed that I have not updated in more than six months.

It's funny though. It's been about three years since I started the story. Writing can mark progress of one's life, and I can tell from reading my old work that I have grown up. My characters were flat and two-dimensional, based on stereotypical characters I had often read about in books or watched in movies. But the 18-year-old me has met many different people in the last three years. I've watched relationships grow, bloom, and wilt; I've met some pleasantly eccentric and not-so-pleasantly weird people; and I myself have changed. When I read the writing I wrote as a 15-year-old, I am dismayed by how flat Rhys is, how much I oversimplified Rory's character, and how underdeveloped the supporting characters are. A part of me is too embarrassed to reread my work, but on the other hand, another part of me is dying to rewrite and revise.

Pssttt. Want to know something? I had this idea of writing a blog from the point of view of a Duke freshman girl. I was considering wiping out Heart & Crossbones and starting over with a new semi-fictional blog. I'd create a new persona and write about the girl's epic adventures. Since my life is so boring, I'd entertain my friends with fictional accounts of Duke life. Win-win, right? I get to live vicariously (as I always do) through my character, and the rest of you get a good story.

Unfortunately, it turns out that I have way too much shit to do every day. But who knows? Maybe I might. Someday, sometime.

And now, jumping to yet another completely unrelated note... I feel strangely excited, and seemingly for no reason. But then again, I'm sure I'll feel otherwise Monday morning when I get up for class.

Highlights of the Day, No. 2

• Meeting Tangerine's sister and a ton of kickass upperclassmen at the IV freshmen welcome party. (Even though I'm not Christian, I felt right at home.)
• "I told my friends once day when I was really hyper, 'I'm so excited about coming to Duke! I'm going to find a guy and become a Duchess!" -- J, a girl I share several mutual friends with who hung out with me this evening.
• In all honesty, Orientation Week wasn't really my cup of tea. But things are definitely looking up.

But on the downside...

CLASSES START TOMORROW! EEK.

Highlight of the Day, No. 1

Webcamming with Pear and Tangerine on oovoo. I miss them like hell.

I'm Alive

and dead tired.

I apologize for my lack of existence on the Internet these past few days. On one hand, I feel like updating everybody on this really trivial thing called "my life." But on the other hand, the little voice in my head -- and even my parents -- have been nagging me to go out of my room and make new friends. So until things get into a groove and I find an incredible group of friends to describe to you all, I will continue to be fairly absent.

Just one brief note:

So I've always semi-prided myself for not being terribly emotional. I don't cry when I watch sad movies, I don't gush at cute things, and I don't really freak out that often.

Well, I don't know anymore. I feel like I've become a softy or something. For all of you who haven't gone off to college yet, have you ever wondered if your parents will cry when you say goodbye? Before, I figured that if anybody was going to be crying, it would be my mother. I mean, she doesn't cry that often. But she hates tragedies and I would say I'm pretty close to her.

But guess what? Neither of my parents shed a single tear (or if they did, I didn't see them at all). Guess who was the one who was sniffling and crying?

ME.

Geez. I must be getting old and sentimental.

I MISS YOU ALL.

L'avenir

Fortune cookies amuse me. As with horoscopes, I read them merely for entertainment, for the words readily slip from my mind once I fold up the newspaper or vacate my chair at the restaurant.

But I kept this particular slip of paper for a reason. It'll be our little game. Let's see how the Sophelia of November 16, 2009 will differ from the Sophelia of August 16, 2009.

Approximately 23 hours from now, I will be aboard a plane heading to Durham, North Carolina. If I manage to finish packing, write all my letters, and take care of my goodbyes before then, I will write a movie review of Miyazaki's latest film, Ponyo, in my usual brand of sarcastic, cynical commentary.

-----------------
(To my fictionpress readers who have discovered my blog: I manged to complete about 85 percent of Ch. 16 of EP last night. The original intent was to have it posted before I leave for college. At this point, I do not believe I can finish writing it before I leave for my flight tomorrow evening. I have not given up on EP, but to be frank, it is not at the top of my priorities during this very emotional, life-changing period of my life.

But thank you for all your support. It's what keeps me writing, even after all these years.)

Exit II

I usually make it a point not to post twice in the same day. That kind of narcissism is just unnecessary and unhealthy. But let's make an exception for today, since who knows how much I'll be posting once I leave for college.

After some thought, I've decided to bring my bulletin board with me to college. Now, that means I need to clean off all the letters and pictures and trinkets that I have amassed on my beloved board. So as I dug threw the layers, I found the card that Kit Kat wrote to me for my 17th birthday. It made me laugh, so here's a laugh for you, Kat:

I'm giving you a locket without a key or lock. It's to guard yourself from the unknown. The chain and lock represent tragic love, esp. Honjo Ren and Nana. They are twistedly dependent on each other, you don't want that to happen to you, right? That's why you get a necklace with no openings or whatnot. For example, one of the greatest couples in history died because of love. Romeo + Juliet And there's Nancy Spungen + Sid Vicious. Nancy was stabbed and killed in the stomach while Sid died from drug overdose. Who wants a life like that? So I say, we don't need love. We don't need mushy words on cardboard cards and cupids in the corners. We don't need to act stupid and embarrass ourselves because we are "in love." So guard your heart with this necklace and forget about "love."

Haha, oh Kit Kat. What am I going to do without your crazy cards every year...

Exit

So my mother finally yelled at me today. Well, I think I already knew it was too good to be true, considering how she had been so remarkably patient and good-humored ever since I came back. I guess she bottled it for too long, because her blowup actually came rather arbitrarily. We just happened to drive by the place I used to get tutoring for the SAT II, which led her to talk about the college presentation I did with Gov. J, C, and S. And then, it all went downhill from there. Basically, she managed to fill a twenty-minute car ride with everything that had bothered her since the beginning of second semester (plus some of junior year, in which she nailed me for not really taking practice SAT tests, as opposed to Gov. J who revealed that she had taken over 15 practice tests. Love that girl, but I HATE being compared to her).

Whatever. I acknowledge most of her arguments, including getting lazy my senior year and getting crummy scores on the AP tests. The one thing that REALLY ticks me off though, is how she always says, "Your father wouldn't be so reluctant to pay your college tuition if you had gotten into Harvard." Um... okay, I'm SORRY I got into Duke. I'm SORRY that the only colleges Asian parents seem to know are Harvard, Stanford, and Berkeley.

What's my worst fear? My worst fear is not being able to regain my work ethic once I start school again. I really let myself go during my senior year. There's a lot of pressure on my shoulders. My father was very reluctant to pay the tuition for Duke -- and the only reason he really decided to let me go is that I argued that I'd have a better chance of getting into medical school if I go to a private school. If my grades drop, my parents said they could easily just stop paying for my tuition.

Yup. So now that my happy bubble of carefree living has burst, I'd better go take care of packing.

On another unrelated note, I am considering changing my blog name and url. I will warn you all ahead of time if I decide to switch things up.

The Countdown

three

Jetlagged, she awakens at noon from a 13-hour slumber. Drowning in the flood of sunlight, she struggles to fight her way out of the sprawled tangle of strewn clothing and sheets. She has already missed breakfast, but her stomach is apathetic to the serpentine scent of food trailing up from the kitchen downstairs. Acting entirely on instinct, the first thing she does upon getting up, like typical 21st century spawn, is to log onto facebook and check her wall posts. Her friends -- now all so far away -- have written messages recounting newly imprinted memories and thanking her for "being there" for them this summer. Being there, being here -- she's here but her heart is still there. She feels the familiar trickle of hot, saline pearls and the blurriness of vision. Her eyes are in need of their own set of windshield wipers, but she is never going to let anyone know that she is shedding tears over the technicalities of geography, of the distance between the "here" and the "there."

two

This time, she awakens at 1 pm in the afternoon to the shudder of her vibrating cell phone. An hour and a half later, she is peeling the wrapping paper off of a blue scrapbook that has just been dropped off at her door. When she sees the graduation picture sealed onto the cover of the book, she cannot help but smile. As she turns the pages, grinning at one photograph or laughing at the scribbled middle school note tucked into one of the pages, she is there again. She is there, sprinting all the way from Pier 39 to Pier 1 in San Francisco with three of her most beloved friends laughing by her side. She is there, stacking the chess pieces across the chess board in a reenactment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, complete with Hobbit pawns and Elvish bishops. She is there, glued in front of the computer screen watching the devilishly handsome Marble-Eyed Prince offer his unsullied handkerchief to the distressed heroine and vicariously experiencing the frisson of Eros' arrow. And she is here, holding the months-long project of her dearest and closest friend and feeling all the more ashamed of not having created something to keep the here and there locked hand-in-hand. Today's here, Rogue is by her side; but at tomorrow's here, Rogue won't be there. The grains of sand are slipping down the hourglass like beads of tears slipping down porcelain skin, but she is never going to let anyone know that she is shedding tears over the technicalities of time, of the seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years between the "here" and the "there."

one

Today, she is unceremoniously dragged out of bed by her mother, who tells her she will forever be trapped in the wrong time zone if she continues to sleep until noon every day. As she forces herself to pack for college, she suddenly remembers to place her gift to her brother, who is out of town, onto his bed. She enters her brother's room and spies the present from their paternal grandfather she had left on his bed just days ago. Stricken with curiosity, with her mother's approval, she carefully opens the box addressed to her brother and pulls out a small bubble-wrapped package. Nestled within, she discovers, is a compact gold-colored clock, a set of batteries, and a small handwritten note. She inspects the clock for a moment (and concluding it to be untouched and most likely brand-new) before pulling out the folded piece of paper and reading its scrawled message. Her mother is reading over her shoulder, but for once, she does not complain about having eyes watching from behind her back. The letter asks her brother about his well-being and informs him that the clock was a highly treasured gift that Grandfather received from an old Japanese friend more than twenty years ago. Without thinking, she voices her awe at the preciousness of the gift and is oblivious to her mother's silence.

But later, as she is packing her clothes and talking about her trip, she casually asks her mother about whether or not her father will return to his hometown this winter when she suddenly notices with a mixture of shock and uneasiness that her mother is crying. Her mother responds with a voice that carries all the weight of grief, anxiety, exasperation, and age. Her mother has asked her father countless times to fly home and see his parents, but for whatever reason, he has never been particularly warm to her advice. And now, with Grandfather handing down his most beloved gifts and maternal Grandmother giving hundreds of dollars away to her grandchildren, it is all too clear to her mother that her grandparents are already beginning to confront their own mortality.

For the first time, she can distinctly recall the weathered lines on her grandfather's face and the powdered white tips of his graying eyebrows. She recalls how he would forget questions that she had just asked moments ago, how he had gotten lost in the Main Station when he took her to the High-Speed Rail terminal, how her uncle (a physician specializing in oncology) had told her privately that Grandfather was beginning to show signs of dementia. And when her mother tells her that Grandfather may not be able to recognize her anymore within less than a decade, she is neither here nor there. She is torn between two countries, between two times, and this time she lets her mother see her tears.

zero

Tickle me Emo

I've been associated with many adjectives over the course of my brief 18-year-old life. Quiet, shy, weird, funny, witty, tan, pretty, ugly, insane -- and most recently -- badass. But the one that's most closely associated with my blogs -- be it Xanga or blogspot -- is the dreaded three-letter word.

Yes. The one that evokes images of bleeding hearts, black roses, black eyeliner, tight skinny jeans, and lyrical whining with guitar accompaniment. The one that, ironically, is a mere letter away from sharing the same name as a certain beloved furry red resident of Sesame Street.

And to be fair, it would be only too easy to pigeonhole me as "emo." For goodness sake, the freaking title of this blog is "Heart & Crossbones." How much more proof do you need, other than the perpetually black background of this blog?

What I find interesting is the negative connotation that "emo" has. When people call me emo, it usually has that Malfoy-esque intonation. "You're so emo." Translation: "You're so 2005." (For the record, the last two times this has happened has been by the same person -- a certain "elder brother" of mine who has never hesitated to make fun of me and whom I never hesitate to bully either -- so let's just call it even.)

But do I consider myself emo? That depends on your definition. Do I wear black eyeliner everywhere? (No.) Do my bangs cover three-fifths of my face? (No.) Do I wear jeans that cling onto my legs like tights? (Hell no.) But I am drawn to tragedy; I am drawn to the idea of figuratively less-than-functioning hearts, whether bleeding or broken; and I love the sound of the guitar. So what's the answer?

Physically, I don't look ANYTHING like your typical emo kid who takes pictures of herself at a camera angle that allows one's head to cover approximately 80 percent of the picture. I'm actually a little curious as to what kind of image my blog conjurs in the minds of those who stumble upon my blog and have no clue as to what I look like. Granted, I do have my melodramatic moments. But really, would an emo kid write a post about how people call her emo? Would an emo kid really spend more than two hours writing a post that completely bludgeoned Snow White and the Seven Dwarves? (To be honest, I don't think anyone sane would do so either.)

This post is vaguely starting to remind of me the time when I defended my nerdiness. So let's just embrace it.

I AM AN EMO NERD!!!!! :D

Or maybe not.

Home

What I don't miss:

• Squat toilets
• How the people throw toilet paper in the trash can instead of flushing it down the toilet... which completely stinks up the restroom
• Finding lizards in the bathroom while I'm taking a shower
• The polluted, muggy air of the city
• Feeling like I pissed in my pants every time I walked outside in the humid air in jeans
• Having to worry if I'd get food poisoning from eating food from the night markets
• Getting lost trying to figure out how to transfer lines on the metro
• Spending at least thirty minutes trying to figure out how to meet a friend
• Having someone go up to you in the park and ask if you're from Thailand (because your skin is so tan compared to everyone else)
• Having a saleslady go up to you in the department store and ask you if you're looking for a skin whitening cream (because your skin is so tan, and pale is beauty)
• Having to wash clothes in the hotel room's sink because all the laundry machines are taken
• How some areas of the city smell horrendously of sewage
  

What I do miss:

• Being able to shop freely at the night markets because you have no sense of cheap/expensive when you have to keep converting the prices into American dollars in your head
• Teasing my students and training them to make fun of my teaching partner as well -- all in good humor, of course
• Making fun of teaching partner and laughing at his atrocious accent during class
  
• Hanging out with my Kinmen family -- who really did become like a family to me
  
• Staying up until 3 am talking to my "exes" (ex-roommates) -- taking silly pictures on the roof, discussing certain "fruits," coming up with silly English dubs for TV dramas that we didn't understand
  
• Really getting to know my paternal grandparents, whom I have not seen in four years and have rarely visited in my 18 years of existence
  
• Talking to my maternal grandmother, who I deeply admire -- even at her age, she is very headstrong, independent, and active. When I grow old, I would much rather be like her than sit around the couch all day watching daytime soaps.
• Letting my cousin take me around the city and showing me around
  
• The FOOD (everything is delicious until you realize you've gotten food poisoning)
• The PEOPLE -- groupmates, roommates, friends, family -- I miss them like hell.
  

On the other hand, I don't miss things like this...

Pear (1:10:01 AM): WOW
Pear (1:10:05 AM): u done yet?
Pear (1:10:08 AM): woman...U SLOW
Sophelia (1:10:18 AM): shut it
Pear (1:10:18 AM): MAKE ME A SANDWICH

Snapshot 8 - Storytelling

There was a story I wanted to tell. It was the existential story of a girl who kept waiting. She spent almost ten years of her life suspended between craving for a future and clinging to the past. But when he died an existential, sudden and absurd death, suddenly none of it mattered. Rather than die with the answer, she would have to live with the unanswered question.

But I am not the same. I learned my answer. But I did not die. Or perhaps I did. Perhaps I had been dying the whole time -- and when it finally ended, it felt like death -- liberating.

If I were to continue the story, this is what I would tell you:

The girl vowed to never again trap herself in her own silence. She needed to distance herself from her past, and thus she packed her bags and flew to a country an ocean away. There, she was reborn. Her fashion style reshaped and solidified, giving her an edge of self-confidence. She met a group of friends who became her second family and treated her like a sister. She, who had always been reluctant to talk, would stay up at night with her "family members" talking about a million things she had never once shared with others.

Her family members all had their own stories. Elder Brother talked about the strained relationship between his parents, his mixed feelings towards his current girlfriend, and his lingering feelings towards his ex. Eldest Sister's previous two relationships had left her with the tendency to choose guys whom she thought liked her her more than she liked them -- precisely because she was afraid of getting hurt. One sister had suffered from a hemorrhage two years ago and had to undergo physical therapy to regain use of the right side of her body. The other sister's parents had separated when her father suddenly refused to go to work, leaving only her mother to support her and her sister. Younger Brother had undergone open heart surgery a year ago to fix the hole in his heart.

And what about the girl? Her parents were happily married. She was healthy and had never stayed in a hospital or visited the emergency room. She had never had a boyfriend. The only thing she could think of was how she had wasted her high school years standing still and waiting.

It's a pathetic story. Mais c'est l'histoire de ma vie.

You write your own story. That's what I've finally learned.