February 5, 2010

  • My eyelids changed...

    ...and somewhere along the line, so did everything else.

    Just got back from Crested Butte yesterday and of course I put together a photo album. I have over 80 photo albums on Facebook. Talk about sharing my whole life with the fb world. I'll get around to making those private someday...So, as I was saying, I was putting together the photo album, and then naturally started looking at all the facebook updates. I came across one of the undergrad's profiles that I TA'ed and looked at all the fun photos he had and what his life is like. Got me thinking about my undergrad, so getting all nostalgic, I started looking at all my old photo albums. My my. My life is so different than say, 5 years ago. Yes, FIVE years ago I was still an undergrad at UCI (which I now have to refer to as UC Irvine or else no one here knows what I'm talking about. Took me awhile to figure that one out). Well, I noticed something else also...my eyelids! They always had the double fold, but back then, they were more like single-double folded, ya know, like just a small crease. I then made the transition from RGP to soft contacts in grad school, and an odd thing happened over the next 2 years. One at a time, my eyelids transformed into these filipino looking completely double folded eyelids. No clue how this happened, but it did.

    Over the weekend, Minna talked about how she wished she had recorded things from undergrad, and inevitably that reminded me of my dear Xanga blog. I missed the time I took to write in it each day. The reflection and introspection at the end of the day. I re-read a few and reminisced about the past occurrences. Wow. Things have changed. Who writes blogs anymore? A lot of people still do but they are usually specific topics like workout programs or beauty tips or ways to be greener or whatever. Personally blogging has been ubiquitously replaced by Twitter, FB comments, GChat statuses and the likes. What happened to the days when it was cool to write more than a few sentences (lest a few words) about random thoughts in your head? We truly are the ADD culture and it will only get worse. As always, I am pledging to resist change and share a few more thoughts than what I can say in 3 seconds.

    So here it goes...

    I am amazed at the disparity between people's lives at this point in our lives. I'll name 3 categories for the time being. You've got the married friends - all settled down, fixing up the house, having babies, staying at home on weekends, buying nice things. Then you've got the single friends - bachelors for life (or at least until 35), clubbing it up every weekend, still drinking like they did in undergrad, still not knowing what they're doing with their lives. And finally, the post-college education goers. Grad students. Now this one is tricky. There's also married ones - some who got married before they came, some who got married during, and some who have kids and bring them into lab. Then...you've got the serious relationship people - those who dated starting from grad school, undergrad, and even high school. Then...you've got people who are now single, but were previously in serious relationships from undergrad and haven't found anyone else since. There's also the single people who still do the casual dating and hook up thing and drink like they are still in undergrad. And then there's the single ones that have never been in a relationship still and you really can't see being in one anytime soon either. All these different people with different degrees of relationship experience, all the same age! This boggles my mind just a little...!!!

    I'm not trying to draw any conclusions. I just still have in my mind that there's this progression of experiences up until the point you get married, and when I was 20, I already felt I was at that last stage. It felt a little weird going backwards on that whole scale and then building back up to it, but now I feel like I really want to be at that final stage...but not necessarily because I'm ready for it, but I feel like I'm supposed to be there already and I'm behind if I'm not. I feel like I've always been one who wants to be ahead of the crowd and get to things first to show people how it's done or that I wasn't just going to follow everyone else. I feel like I don't want to be left behind when I very well know that there are way more people on the back end of this progress line I've made up. I've just always refused to be the last or near last at anything. Why am I so adamant about this?

    I blame grad school and relationships for all this. But I know where I am is a consequence of many many choices piled on top of each other, so why am I 'blaming' these for my situation now? This is what I chose because obviously doing this is important to me and what I think will fulfill part of my career needs/desires. I need to accept all territory that comes with it. I'm not really complaining, just thinking aloud...

    ...I just still can't be sure of myself that I'm not wishing things were different. That's probably enough emo-ness for now...maybe this is why i stopped blogging in the first place....lol (I'm pretty sure Sean will read this and automatically assume I am not happy with him. Well that's his problem if he wants to think that. =P)