Back home in Ohio! It's so green, and the sky is so blue, and the windows are not gray with pollution. Wow. No sound of traffic or neighbors' voices, no more crazy humidity and high temperatures, no more cockroaches anywhere, and very few mosquitoes, thank goodness. On the downside, there are still bugs--a large black ant was crawling on my leg while I lay in bed reading manga, and I proceeded to flick it from my leg and whack it with an LSAT book, to little avail since it was on my bed, and then I took some tissue and killed it. Yay. I vacuumed up a bunch of dead bugs in the upstairs rooms and felt relieved.

Drinking directly from a faucet again. It feels strange. Super absorbent toilet paper, three squares of which are the equal of four thin sheets of toilet paper in Taiwan.

I went running outside yesterday morning while the sky was still black outside. It was 3 a.m., I was jetlagged and out of shape, and the electricity had gone out, so I decided it was time to do some exercise. I ran a mile really slowly. 11 minutes and 45 seconds. =_= Today I waited until there was some daylight, around 6:30 a.m., and ran the same distance in 11 minutes and 8 seconds. I'm getting back into shape!

Today I did laundry. Oh, the dryer is wonderful. In Taiwan, we hung up the laundry outside to dry, since we didn't have a dryer, and the clothes would feel all stiff and crinkly afterwards, and you'd have to iron it if you didn't want it to look wrinkled. Today I pulled the clothes out of the dryer--soft clothes!--and folded them, and that was that. Bliss.

To end, an article that perfectly details my unproductiveness in writing: "What Took You So Long? The quiet hell of 10 years of novel-writing."

Feeling sick again, but hopefully I won't actually get sick, seeing that I was just sick last week (for all of 2-3 days).

Grad school news is finalized: I'm going to Yale next year for my MA in East Asian Studies, and then Purdue the year after that for my MFA in Creative Writing (Purdue is a three-year program). I can still hardly believe my good fortune in Purdue agreeing to let me defer. They must really like me, right? In sum, my application results have ended in a best-case scenario, somehow. (And I have full funding on both programs, did I mention that? I'll have to teach at Purdue, but that will be a good experience, or so I'd like to believe.)

My nose isn't just a leaky faucet. It's a freaking waterfall. Gaaaaaaah. I am sick as a dog, sick like a log stuck in a bog lost in the fog.

In other news, nice blog post on willpower here. BIC. Butt In Chair. I like that.

I wrote a 7-page short story in Chinese as my final paper for Chinese class last quarter. Despite coming up with it on the spur of the moment, and despite no one being able to understand what was really going on in it, I thought it had actual potential (the premise: when the world forgets how to read). So tonight I did a quick rough translation of it into English. And whoa. The story idea is still not bad, I think, but whoa. I wince. Everything has to be completely rewritten, starting with the tone. It's one thing to write like a crazy person in Chinese where I misuse and abuse the language horribly, I'm sure, but knowing exactly what I sound like in English, I just can't keep up the crazy person tone for an entire story. That's why there are only short scenes told from K's POV in my novel, and I still have trouble deciding how crazy she should sound.

Also, I need to stop playing mindless games like Minesweeper and this matching game in the HP game Purble Place. Gaaah. Such a waste of time.

Reading a fanfic online tonight, I found I was annoyed by this use of the ellipse: "For the first time, he felt something like...hope." The line already gets its own paragraph. I think there's an implied emphasis on hope even without the ellipse. Let's look at it ellipse-less: "For the first time, he felt something like hope." Much smoother, mmm.

Oh yeah, so this is why I need more angst in my life--so that I can write

Friend A was somewhat offended that Friend B had told all their other friends about her (Friend B's) problems a while ago and only now chose to include her (Friend A) in her confidence. I wrote to Friend B, "Well, now she knows how it feels to be left out of the loop when everyone else knows."

As I typed these words, bitterness I thought I had conquered three years ago welled up like bile in my throat, irrepressible and undeniable. An old wound of betrayal, scarred into an ugly shape; a memory that will never be happy; a thousand regrets. They clog my senses with salted pain. Go away, I whisper. Ghosts of the past have no place lingering in the daylight of today and tomorrow. Go away. The apparition remains. I close my eyes.

Describing something in a beautiful way makes you suddenly realize that what you are describing is actually exquisite. Mmm.

So, grad school: I'm going! Very likely to Yale for a Master's in East Asian Studies, seeing that they've accepted me. Yay! I still have to hear back from several more schools, but chances are I'll choose Yale. On the topic of grad school applications, perhaps I could have saved a lot in application fees if I'd thought out what I wanted to do more thoroughly. But the whole reason I applied to two different types of programs because I couldn't decide, and I wanted the schools to decide for me. Yay fate. Though I applied to thirteen schools (11 MFA, 2 EAS), I didn't exactly have a reach school--with MFA programs, there's no guarantee I'd get into any of them. If I had a school I thought I should get into, it was Yale. And that was mostly because Jeff got in when he applied, and I don't want to think that I'm any worse than him, academically. Hah. But Yale's not a safety school either. Because it's Yale. Obviously. So yeah. Anyways. Yay for having a place to go next year! Yay for East Asian Studies!

...And now I need to stop my brag-fest and get working on my novel before I run out of free time.