Erwaman's Personal Journal - September 2008

My writing was just a string of ideas, with no central theme or fluidity from idea to idea. No logical coherence.

I met with a Chinese tutor later today and reviewed my essay with her. She pointed out the sloppiness of my structure, how I would begin a paragraph with an idea and then talk about something else. Going over it with my tutor, I really saw just how messy and discombobulated my essay was.

Is it just my Chinese writing that sucks? No, my English writing is just as bad. I never really liked anything I wrote for LA class; I never was very proud of my academic writing. Intuitively, I knew my writing was bad, but I think today I finally understood my main problem was an issue of structure. My writing is too stream-of-conscience. I don't lay out my ideas well and develop them. I don't give enough examples. I need better transitions.

It's very hard to face this reality now. I definitely need to take a writing course, break my writing down, and learn to write all over again. In HS, I got by English classes simply by acing vocabulary and content recall quizzes. These 100s balanced out my poor composition grades and I managed to scrape by with A and A- averages. But now I want to learn how to actually write. I'm stressed out, and it's tough looking at all those red marks on my Chinese composition, but I'd like to work on my writing and improve.

Looking ahead to next week, I realized I have a problem set for a different class due each day, except Friday. Physics, math, comp sci, EE, in that order. And as I turn one in, I'm just going to get another set. It's a repetitive cycle, and I better get used to it. Procrastinating and letting the work pile up is only going to exacerbate my stress, so I just need to start early on all my work, plan ahead, and prioritize my time.

I've been pretty stressed all day, but this evening, I came to terms with myself and got started on my work. I'm feeling much better.

A couple other events also brought relief. YPMB practice. I really got into the music and forgot my troubles for a while. I am so pumped for our first football game and halftime show tomorrow (or rather, later today)! After practice, when I got back to my suite, I found all our garbage from past parties cleared away - all the pizza boxes and assorted wrappers thrown away, and the mountainous bin of empty cans and bottles removed. Actually, someone used tack and a few dozen empty beer cans to spell out YALE on our common room wall. It's big and bold, and it makes me smile.

I'm going to sleep now, got 7:22 AM band call. Good night.

Okay, well, it started off poorly, idling from midnight to 1:30 AM before finally deciding I was getting nothing done on my Chinese composition, so I went to sleep. I got up at 6:30 and finished my composition around 8 and went to the Commons for breakfast. Ate with a Chinese classmate, studied for our Lesson 2 pre-quiz, then I left early to go study outside, where I could focus better, then ended up walking to class with another classmate and testing each other some more. My best Chinese class so far! (except for messing up a few questions on the pre-quiz)

Chinese has been quite a struggle so far - I say I've averaged two to three hours every day (weekends included) building up my vocabulary. Lesson 1 was painstakingly slow - I had to stop and look something up on average every five words or so because (1) I didn't work very hard in Chinese school or take it very seriously and didn't learn very much, (2) I went to an English-instruction school in Beijing for kindergarten and 1st grade before moving to the U.S. (I really wish I had gone to a full-out Chinese school back then - I bet my Chinese reading and writing skills would be sooo much better. I wonder when kids in Chinese can start to read and understand the Chinese newspaper?), (3) I'm much more familiar with Traditional Chinese than Simplified Chinese, so I had to relearn a lot of simple words that are really quite basic but just look significantly different between the two writing systems and thus were not easy to guess. I'm just not used to using sophisticated vocabulary in speaking and writing, so I've been doing lots of studying trying to enhance my vocab. (I feel like I'm studying for SATs all over again.) It's actually really fun dissecting a passage and trying to figure out what words and phrases mean with the help of a dictionary. It's really analytical and though it sounds really tedious, I actually enjoy figuring words out and phrases that aren't in the dictionary. It's also really interesting when I can look at the parts of a character, such as its radical, left and right parts, or top and bottom parts, and better understand a word that way. Finally, comparing traditional and simplified characters is fun, too, though sometimes I'm like "WHAT?! How is this simplified character anything like the traditional character?" Once, I even found a simplified character that was more strokes than its traditional counterpart!

Oh, anyways, besides Chinese, I also had Intro to Computer Science and Intensive Introductory Physics today. CS was pretty mind-stimulating - we did lots of recursion practice problems in Scheme, which was the language chosen for use because most college freshmen have never programmed in Scheme before and it's supposed to be a good language for illustrating CS concepts. Anybody else using Scheme?

I drifted in and out of consciousness a few times in physics, and I sat in the first row, too! I remember one instance when I was holding a pen in my hand, and then drifted out of consciousness for a split second, felt the pen start sliding down my hand, woke up and caught the pen before it slid out of my hand.

Oh yeah, so why was today productive? Sounds like a pretty normal day so far right? Ok, maybe doing the composition and studying this morning was sort of productive. But then in the afternoon I ate lunch with a friend, did laundry, got my schedule signed and submitted, turned in a bunch more forms, got a MCV4 vaccination, and talked to my parents about sending me some stuff (like my tux for the YCB's first concert 9/27) and helping me with Chinese (sent my mom my first composition and some lesson 1 material).

Ok, so the MCV4 shot was my first shot in over two years. I did much psychological preparation to brace myself for the shot (I greatly dislike things making holes in me.), and finally time came for my shot. I looked away, telling the doctor I didn't like looking while the shot was administered. I focused on being in another place. Well, the doctor starts asking me, "Are you gonna be woozy? Are you okay?" Then she tells me she has to fill out some stuff before I leave. I'm still thinking, when is the prick gonna happen? Then I look, and there's already a Band-Aim on my arm. I literally had no idea that the needle had already been in and out of my arm! I have never had such a painless injection before! Wow, I wish everything in life was this painless. I speculate perhaps because I was just so exhausted (my mind truly was not functioning properly today and still isn't) to notice, overwhelmed by droopy, bothersome eyes. Well tonight, I'm gonna go visit the Zoo (a computer cluster in the CS building) to do my CS problem set and then perhaps drop by the bridge club!

In other news, this past weekend was the best so far (well, we've only had three), and I felt like I was initiated into the Yale community. I was all hyped up and excited to be here. I was digging this place. Friday afternoon, we had a very energetic YPMB rehearsal that pumped me for our first football game this Saturday vs. Georgetown at the Yale Bowl. Then, that night, I went to the band Toga Party! (Earlier, I went with some bandies to a Salvation Army store to buy toga material. I found a turquoise bedsheet for $1.99; I also bought some white pants for YPMB use for $4.99! The prices are so good I'm tempted to go back and buy other stuff.) Dressing up in a toga was interesting and definitely added to the party spirit. Alcohol also contributed, and it was very amusing to watch drunk and semi-drunk people from a sober perspective. I was greatly humored by conversations with semi-drunk people who rationally told me they were semi-drunk. They told me they understood and had experience in my position (sober viewing drunk) and thought it was probably just as fun as actually being drunk (I have a slightly different opinion.). During my socializing, I found myself saying lots of stupid things, like asking someone's name again 10 seconds after I'd just learned it, and saying just really obvious, duh, stupid, or rhetorical stuff. Several times, I retroflected, trying to diagnose if my judgment and thinking was impaired. I was fully conscious, right? My drink wasn't spiked? No, I was completely sober, just talking like an idiot. Maybe it was the influence of being surrounded by drunk people?

Saturday, again I did no work, just explored Alan's college, Pierson. I went there for brunch, and since the dining hall wasn't open yet when I arrived, I started exploring the basement of Pierson, and I ended up walking outside again, then going back inside to enter the dining hall. I felt déjà vu, like I'd been in this place before, though I had never eaten in the Pierson dining hall. Then I saw a friend from Davenport and wondered what she was doing here. Then I realized I was in the Davenport dining hall. So I discovered Pierson and Davenport are connected inside.

Spent the rest of Saturday hanging out with people around Old Campus and thoroughly enjoyed myself. Got back to the dorm and socialized some more with my suitemates and visitors and somehow or other didn't get to sleep until like 4 AM. Well, Sunday, I had to do work after two days of fun. I went to the library and saw more people there than I'd ever seen before. I guess Sunday's a popular work day. Anyways, I felt I really got a flavor of Yale this past weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it.

I was gonna take a nap, but scratch that, I'm gonna get dinner with my suitemates and then head over to the Zoo. A nap would only screw up my sleep schedule and cause the same cycle to repeat tomorrow, so I'm just going to tough it out and sleep early.