Spoke with dad today. Glad bro and dad could come home safely. 15 hours of non-stop driving. Ning-ning has grown up. Somehow I thought about taking things for granted. Ning-ning staying with ma and pa is something I should learn to appreciate more.

52 days after the break-up. I threw up after lunch and still bothered by the thoughts.

It is easier to say I am smarter than what I've done for myself. I know the reason he would say that is because he was probably never wholeheartedly involved in the last 13 months of the relationship.

I still have anger and saddness in side of me. Knowing he is not a perfect man did not help. People say he is selfish, people say he is immature, people say he is not a kind man, people say he is not independent soul, people say he is too emotional, people say he carries way too much of baggage, people say he is going through waves of relationships only to invent himself...

But I know he is the one who's cried like a baby; he is the one who laugh like a boy; he is the one occasionally stood in front of me like a man, he is the one that through my own eyes I've seen every inch of his body and soul in the last 13 months.

I pray God to bring me peace of mind, to settle the anger and hatred.

Hot spring and Love

She said falling-in-love is fairy-tale-like and short-lived. The intense and devouring nature made it hard for us to live in the moment forever.

It is like a hot spring, extremely soothing and relaxing, but one cannot stay there for long. Otherwise, one leaves out what real life is to offer and gets dehydrated by the heat. Once a while, one wants to find time to visit that feeling for some joyous moments here and there, so to refresh and warm one's body and mind, in preparation for the coming journey ahead.

Guilt

What is the best way to forgive yourself, especially it was me who behaved wrongly? The sense of guilt is suffocating. Is the recipient of the wrong doing willing to see an apology from me?

I found myself is the one I feel the most difficult to find peace with.

Eyes are all puffy from crying last night. A nice chill day is reaching me through the newly curtained windows. I gazed outside and wondered what is happening in that top floor unit just two blocks down the street. Is there also a girl...

sad. angry. devasdated.

why? why? why? why so soon?

Dave Gorman dumped me during fifth period of sixth-grade math, in a pencil-scrawled note his friend passed me when the teacher wasn't looking. I went to the bathroom and cried, but by seventh period, I was fine. Email Print HuffIt --> When Steve and I finally said goodbye in late August of my junior year in college, I drove my car to an overlook on the George Washington Parkway and cried until a police officer came by, made me walk in a straight line, and told me to move on. So I did. In fact, until recently, I'd never really had a problem breaking up and moving on. Sam and I broke up this past fall -- amicably and mutually -- and I was more or less doing fine. Then Sam sent me an email that said: "Just wanted to let you know that I changed my Facebook profile to incorporate our current status." He was referring to Facebook.com, an online social network for college kids. He was actually being a good guy, too, letting me know that the personal information part of his profile no longer read "in a relationship with Ashley Parker," and I should probably change my profile too. But for the first time, I felt oddly crushed. Sam was no longer "in a relationship with Ashley Parker," and I was no longer "in a relationship with Samuel Reeves." Innocently enough, Sam had cemented our break-up for the entire world -- well, online world -- to see. In the click of a button, everything suddenly seemed more permanent, more tragic somehow. Finally I admitted to my best friend that breaking up on Facebook was almost harder than breaking up in real life, expecting her to laugh. "Oh, changing your online status is the most devastating part of a break-up," she said. "Absolutely." Then a friend of mine from college confessed that he'd cringed when he saw that his old girlfriend -- who he had dumped -- had changed her Facebook profile from "in a relationship" to "looking for whatever I can get." Whatever she could get? Really? Of course, this phenomenon is not totally new. Stalking our exes, I imagine, is as old as exes themselves -- steaming open letters in the days of Jane Austen, and calling in to check his voice mail in the early 90s of Bridget Jones -- and this latest itieration just allows us to use quicker and better and smarter technology to create a virtual map of our ex's life without us. But for me, the obsession started innocently enough on Facebook. Did Sam change his relationship status to "single," I wondered, or did he generously leave that slot blank? (He left it blank.) Had he added any new female friends? And were they cute? You could even browse through digital pictures of these girls and, if especially desperate, have your friends browse through them too, for a reassuring second opinion. "See," I would explain, "If you look in the back corner... yeah, very closely...and squint, maybe... you can see a girl in a black tank top..." "You mean the girl reading a book? Who's barely even in the picture?" came my friend's incredulous reply. "I'm hanging up now." But I was hooked. And Sam's Facebook "wall" -- an interactive space where his friends could post messages -- offered yet another outlet for my probing neuroses. I scoured his wall, reading and rereading his messages in my search for clues about any interloping suitors. Just who was that bikini-clad girl, writing "I had fun with you!" Oh, that was his younger sister. But what about the cute blond from Texas, wishing him a happy birthday. I repeated the message aloud, trying to gauge tone: Did she mean happy-birthday-we-went-to-elementary-school-together-and-I-just-want-to- say-hi-happy-birthday, or did she mean happy-birthday-Mr.-President-happy- birthday? MySpace.com was even worse. This networking site forces you to choose a relationship status -- single, swinger, in a relationship, married, or divorced, but you have to choose one -- making that "on a break but not quite broken up" stage particularly awkward. You could also check the last time someone had logged on to their own MySpace account, and I checked to see if Sam had been on recently. Had he been on too recently? Or too frequently? What if he also was tracking someone else? I realized I was cyber-stalking someone to see if he, too, was cyber-stalking someone. I'd reached an all-time low, I thought. Things could only improve from here. But things, of course, did not improve. In stalking Sam, I had realized how utterly stalkable I was -- and, in looking at my own profiles, what a dull and un-stalk-worthy stalkee I would make. Suddenly, the instant message I put up when I was away from my computer took on grave importance. Sam might see it, after all, and I needed to affect that perfect combination of nonchalant fun or carefree casual. My actual activities now seemed horribly mundane -- "Reading the Sunday Times" or "Just beat the roomies in a marathon Scrabble session" would no longer suffice -- but I couldn't skew to the other extreme, either. "Wine with the new guy across the hall," and even "Dinner and a movie" both fell into the trying-too-hard camp. Not to mention they were more than a little dishonest. I generally opted for cryptic song lyrics, and am forever indebted to the Grateful Dead's assorted musings ("Every silver lining has got a touch of gray.") As it turned out, the MySpace stalking was just a minor blip in my actual all-time low, which occurred a few days later, when my boss called me one Saturday afternoon with a quick question. She was horrified to find me sitting at home, flipping between newspapers and Instant Message Stalking Sam. "Instant message stalking?!" she asked, still sounding worried, but now equal parts intrigued, as if I'd just discovered a novel way of keeping tabs on the confounding men in our lives. "What's that?" I didn't have the heart to tell her that it wasn't that cool, that I was beholden to a machine, perched and waiting for the cling of a new instant message. Nor did I want her to realize that her dutiful researcher and fact-checker had also become a wee bit unhinged. But against my better judgment, I tried to explain. "Well, let's say Sam-- er, I mean, Someone -- put up an away message at 9 p.m. on Friday night, saying he was going out," I began. "Instant messaging lets you tell when that person is back using their computer again. So let's say he put up an away message on Friday night, and now it's, oh..." I checked my watch. "...and now it's 2 p.m. on Saturday afternoon, and he's still not back at his computer. That clearly means he went out and met an amazing girl and stayed over at her house and then to make matters worse he probably liked her enough to go get brunch with her the next day which is the only possible reason he's not back at his computer yet and they're probably right now running through a park while 'Brown Eyed Girl' plays in the background." "Hypothetically," I added. My boss cut me off. "Maybe he slept late," she said. "Maybe he's just not using his computer. It is 75 degrees and sunny -- he might just be outside." I could tell she was really worried when she offered to go to some wonky soiree she would never have considered just hours before. "Look, on Wednesday we'll go to that book party," she said. "I bet there will be lots of guys your type there -- smart, dorky, awkward." That was the moment I realized I needed to make a change. I declared a technological moratorium on Sam. I stopped checking Facebook and MySpace, and I deleted his number from my phone so I could no longer text him, just to see what he was up to. I also took him off my Buddy List, so I could no longer tell when he was or was not instant messaging, or how long he'd been away from his computer. A friend even offered to rig my Gmail account so that all of Sam's emails landed directly in my junk folder. At some point, finally, I began to recover, and was able to laugh at the other hapless souls, bound to their computer screens by a person distinctly not on the other end. I spent a day outside, wandering through Dupont Circle with a friend. I used the time I would have been stalking to reread Katha Pollit's piece in The New Yorker, an homage to "Webstalking" from early 2004. I still understood her pain, but I no longer felt it. Moreover, her essay wasn't relevant anymore -- neither to myself nor to any other would-be stalkers. Not yet three years old, her essay is, in the hyper-speed of technology, a bit like binary code -- ground-breaking for its time, but almost painfully simple at second glance. After all, Pollitt was just Googling her former lover, albeit frantically, and in every available search engine. But still -- how simple! How philistine! How utterly cyber-stalking 1.0! I wanted to shake her. Didn't she know this addicting pastime had progressed to version 2.0, if not higher. Didn't she know about SingleStat.us? SingleStat.us is a now-defunct service that, for a mere $3.95, would email you the very instant any of your crushes changed their MySpace status to single. (I imagine that first flirty email would require an icebreaker like, "Now that you've been single for, oh, three hours, 39 minutes, and 22 seconds or so...") The website, however, struck me as a bit silly, and reflected depths I was no longer willing to plunge. Besides, I had better things to do with my time. A few days later, I happily accompanied my boss to a book party at a storied D.C. haunt. The guys weren't quite my type, but there were books and wine and friends. And, thankfully, no wireless internet.

I am not an atheist.

Love the girl with a planner book!

Just a few thoughts worth of taking them done:

I am drawn to portraits: either photo or painting. People's facial expressions always make me wonder their life, their experience, their love and anger. Relatively, I am less attracted to the cold glamorous lifeless objects unless it is tied to human experiences. With that being said, the futuristic arts are definitely not my type of art.

I prefer to dress up tasteful within the budget. Mixing and matching are so much of fun.

In this life, I will learn one kind of musical instruments. It is definitely a pleasure to have musical notes flowing out of my finger tips.

I am a drama, independent films and discovery channel person when it comes to movie and tv. My favorite work-out is city hiking and dancing. I do not sing much but I enjoy plays. I love the intense feeling of those work.

Intense. My love is intense. Burning, desiring, and sharing.

I have a high tolerance towards the imperfection. That is the reason why i am not great but I am good and I am on my way to great. That is the part I like about myself.

I want to have a pet, a dog to be precise.

I want to be on a volunteer project, out in Africa, living in the wild for at least three months.

I want to eventually work for a non-profit firm, even just distributing penciles, used computers and water, to be a not so glamerous person, but to see my work is doing something good in people's life.

I do not want to ever see DT and RK in my life forever. Some people are born with predatory nature. I know having a good distance between me and them work for me the best. I would never imagine how I could turn such an ugly side of self to a even friend-used-to-be.

Somehow I was thinking about Wei. The one who was the closest friend of mine in the graduate school. I found she has a lot in common with those two. Pretty good presentation layers yet an empty hallow inside. It does not matter how pretty they look from the outside.

"One of the biggest challenges I face is how to keep a discussion focussed on the issues at hand rather than the personalities involved. The best debates (and the most passionate ones..) happen when the individuals involved can argue diametrically opposite points without any risk that the personal equations might get affected. In my last job this is one aspect I enjoyed the most - we will have raging discussions on a particular topic within the engagement team but will go out for a beer after that .. the next morning everyone is normal till we get into our next set of debates. Good ideas and output are very often not a result of a situation where ideas converge but clash head on. Let me elaborate on this - if four people in a group think alike all the time, the group is wasted. On the other hand if there is a clash of opinions, points and counterpoints are made and accepted in the right spirit - the best group outcomes emerge.If the above is true, why is it so difficult to come to such a situation. There are multiple reasons but to me some of the most prominent ones are:1. Inability to separate the "opinion" from the person. We often judge a comment based not on the merit of the comment but based on who is making the comment. In some sense we "personalize" the opinion and miss the wood for the trees.2. Inability to structure the discussion. Random thinking is often passed of as creative thinking and inputs. Opinions and viewpoints need to differ within a given framework - if they do not, conflicts emerge and the "discussion" often breaks down.To achieve the balance is very difficult - something I keep struggling with. However there are individuals on campus who are good at this and some of the best discussions I have had are with such inviduals. VB, YE and U are some people who I can think of ... I will keep trying ... insulate the opinion or the argument from the person ..shoot the message if you have to .. don't shoot the messenger !!! this comes from practice and reflection... will make sure that i find time for the later as i practice it quite often anyway...Apologies if some of this sounds a little convulated... i write as i think .. there are not too many filters in between."

Chinese wisdom

If you got bitten by a dog, you shall not try to make it right by biting the dog back!

Oooops

I just realized I may have made a mistake to keep someone unnecessarily posted about this blog. Shit! Shit! Shit! Done is done! Just I sent him an apology and I pray he will be a bit of generous to accept my apology. It was not meant for him whatsoever!

I am back!

I am back to my blogging!

I read my old posts again and realized turning into 30 did not make me immediately emotionally smarter. I failed, yet I learned, although I had blindly trusted and unnecessarily exposed myself to a "not-so-great" guy over and over again. Done is done. I just realized he is the second person that has disappointed me as a human being in a 30-years-3-months-11-days life of mine. I am not sure if I coped with the situation better than last time. In this secrete and sacred world of mine, I shout on the top of my lung to admit: nightmare, throwing up, the worst being the fear of the third, the fourth, the fifth.

The good news is today I am calm and I think straight and I am blogging positively. I mostly appreciate people in my life who stand so strongly behind me now. It is their love reminded me of the worth of my humanness, the value of my traits, and the preciousness of my ability to trust human beings in the past, today and future. Stood naked in front of the mirror, I still see the charming, attractive, precious self and the little free spirit inside of me :-)

A geeky note: in this website, how-to-tell-if-a-guy-is-a-jerk, the anthropologistic view of that category of men does make a little sense to me: the animalistic, primitive side of human being.

I shall really look into the opportunity to sign up for the UN mission with Leo :-)