For You

Okay, so I don't know how many of you this post will be relevant to. I don't think I have a whole lot of high school readers. But it's college decision time for some, and I think it's an appropriate time to share this story.

Exactly three years ago (give or take maybe a day or two), I was receiving all of the letters from my early decision/early action schools. It was, needless to say, the worst time of my life, because I got all rejections except for one. This wasn't because I was stupid or because I didn't try hard. I did try very hard. I had a 3.98 GPA and a 32 on the ACT. I was in mostly AP courses, and I got 4's or 5's in all of them. I was in many, many extracurricular activities. I spent my time making sure my application looked perfect. I won awards at my school. My teachers kept telling me I had so much potential, my parents kept saying I was Ivy League-bound, and because I trusted my teachers and parents -- I believed them. 

But my tender, hoping heart was shattered in the middle of December 2007. In my life, two rejections have hurt the most:

1) Getting rejected by my dream school, which will not be named University of Chicago, I'm looking at you right now with your Uncommon Application blog that encourages students to love you with wide, adoring eyes and then coldly delivers rejections with all of the gentleness of a flying cactus. 

2) Getting rejected from college marching band. Yeah, I cried for two hours in the Borders parking lot. Pathetic? Yes. I was really crushed, though. I mean, what other extracurricular was going to take up my free time? I was convinced I would have no friends (because let's be real, I was a band geek and that's how I made friends) and my life would be a black hole of despair and I would never find another interest that would mean as much to me again. 

In a way, I made it a self-fulfilling prophecy. I didn't let myself love anything else. My first semester sucked. I was miserable. I cried all the time and lied when people asked me if I liked college. I mean, what kind of lame kid hates college? I didn't try to make friends or join other things. I went to football games and watched the marching band perform and then I would go back to my dorm room and cry. And maybe eat pints of ice cream. It was 10000x worse because my roommate was in marching band, so I had to watch her go to practice and prep for games and generally be happy as a clown. I was not Okay, even though I did a pretty good job of hiding it. I was hideously, awfully, dreadfully unhappy.

But it got better. Because after a while, I decided I was being a loser and needed to pull my head out of my ass. My dream school that will not be named University of Chicago was not going to come crawling to me saying they'd made a mistake and somehow overlooked my brilliance and how I was born to be their student. It basically came down to this: I could be miserable for four years or I could do something about it. 

So I did do something. Well, actually, I think I was just a spectacularly lucky person and God decided I had suffered enough, so he sent wonderful people my way to shoehorn my head out of my ass and make me go try new things.

And you know what?

Things turned out better than Okay. Because these are things I did that I would not have done if I had gone to my dream school that will not be named University of Chicago because I would've been studying All The Time and because most of these things came out of my being miserable:

1) Participate in a fashion show and learn how to dance. Meet other Asians and stop being so white-washed. I have diverse friends!

2) Go to frat parties. And bars! (Legal age of entry in my collegetown is 19 years, which is not what it would've been in Chicago.)

3) Canvass for a political campaign in another state. 

4) Go to all kinds of sports events.

5) Complete NaNoWriMo.

6) Write a novel. Or two. Or three.

7) Start working at a newspaper (Just to remind you, I had no interest in journalism in high school nor did I participate in anything journalist-y before this; I decided that it would be cool and glamorous to work at a paper, so I randomly got a job there. It is not cool or glamorous, but it is fantastic in other ways.). Do well there! Get promoted! Learn that I have decent people skills! Figure out I can improvise past crappy technology! 

8) Realize that even in a school of 30,000 people, the professors and classes are still amazing. I have professors who are worldwide leaders in their fields, yet still stop me in the hallway to ask how I'm doing. They are happy to see me at office hours and teach me how to be better at writing. They bring cookies and coffee to class out of the sheer goodness of their hearts. Oh, and even though they have hundreds of students, they know my name anyway. 

8) Meet the greatest people I will ever know.

9) Learn that I can move past failure and be successful wherever I go. Prove to myself that no matter what happens, I will be Okay. I might even be better than Okay.

I was studying with some of my friends in the newsroom at 2 a.m. the week before finals, and I told them that I had auditioned for marching band and been rejected. And you know what one of them said? She said, "But if you hadn't been rejected, you never would've started working here, and you wouldn't be my roommate next year. You never would have met us."

And she was right. (Incidentally, she designed the banner for my blog a year ago. Ain't it prettyyyy? So I also wouldn't have that banner.) 

She also said, "Why would you even want to go a school that has the motto Where Fun Goes To Die?" That was the motto of my dream school University of Chicago. The answer is, I don't. Funny how things work out. I'm even glad that the dream school rejected me. Because now I go to a place where fun decidedly does not go to die; fun is alive and well, thank you very much. 

So if you ever think that being rejected from your dream college is the end of the world, know that it's not. Rejection is never the end of the world. There's a lot more world out there, just waiting for you to discover it, if only you will pull your head out of your ass so that you can see better.

Home For The Holidays

Semester's over! I walked in to my house to discover cranberry sauce sitting in a dish on the counter and realized that life is good. My mama knows what I love. I have a freakishly unnatural love for cranberries. In any form. You know what else is great? The prospect of having hot showers at any hour of the day and not having to time the hot water. It is impossible to get a hot shower on Monday morning in my apartment. Yeah, I am really looking forward to my shower tomorrow morning. High standards of happiness. I haz them. 

[I am actually kind of happy that I have showers in any capacity at school because I forgot to pay the water bill on time last month (whoops). They billed me the payment again on this month's bill, so I had to call the water company, which, notice is called ILLINOIS AMERICAN WATER. So I call the service guy and he's like, "So, what state are you calling from, ma'am?" ...Illinois? After putting me on hold for two minutes: "Did you say you were from Missouri?" Just to be clear, I checked the website as I was typing this and Illinois American Water definitely only serves consumers in Illinois. Which would make sense.]

Enough about water. 

The real point: Books I want to read over break. I'm going to try and be ambitious, but let's face it, my family is going to San Diego/LA for a week, I have to study for those godforsaken LSATs, and I should probably get a start on those summer internship apps due in Feb. And I kind of want to write. That's maybe important a little bit somewhat.

1) HIS DARK MATERIALS YES I SWEAR I AM FINALLY GOING TO READ THEM (Philip Pullman). This is one of those series that everyone shames you over if you haven't read it. It's not as bad as say, not having read Harry Potter, but it's still pretty bad. It's like you say you haven't read them, and immediately, people get that look on their faces like, "Jebus, is this girl even literate?" I foraged around the multiple bookshelves in our house, and for some reason, we own The Subtle Knife but not the first book or the third book. Who buys the second book in a series, just the second book? No fucking clue. Us, I suppose. Anyway, I will power through The Golden Compass somehow. I will.

2) STARDUST (Neil Gaiman). I am a sucker for romantic adult fairy tales, it's true. And I am a sucker for Neil Gaiman. Why I have never read this, I have no idea. But I watched the movie recently (again), and it made me wonder where this book has been all my life. It's like tailor-made for me, you know? High fantasy that's romantic and almost Arthurian. I like, I like. 

[I am in a mood for high fantasy right now. Probably because I am really sick of all the vampires and werewolves and dark angels and [insert other dark, smouldering creature here]. I'm sick of "edgy" fantasy, okay, especially as I find stalkerish otherworldly beings completely unsexy. I want a noble hero, not a tortured one. Bring on the fairies and unicorns and princes. I am so there.]

The first piece of fiction I wrote was about a unicorn princess. I was about eight at the time. Yeah, I was a cool kid.

So those books are for sure reads. And then, I have some, want-to reads, but may or may not get to, depending on if I'm distracted by books on the front display at Borders.

3) THE RED QUEEN (Philippa Gregory). Margaret Beauford, mother of Henry VII. What more could a history major want? I do feel like the newer Gregory books are somewhat more one-dimensional. My two favorites from her are The Other Boleyn Girl (Mary and Anne Boleyn) and The Constant Princess (Catherine of Aragon, the greatest queen ever don't try to tell me otherwise), but I don't think Gregory has hit that level of compelling storytelling since.

4) ROOM (Emma Donoghue) is told from the perspective of a 5-year-old boy named Jack, who lives in captivity with his mother. Kind of like that abduction case in Austria a couple of years ago when that guy locked his daughter in his basement for 20-odd years and got her pregnant so by the time the police found her, the daughter had raised a family in captivity. I read a preview of it and was completely blown away by the voice of Jack. This is a situation so horrifying to imagine being in that I feel like it may be too emotionally disturbing for me to get through, but in the end, the payoff will probably be worth it.

Final holiday confession: A couple of years ago, I saw a high fantasy children's book (don't be deceived; this children's book was at least 200 pages long) that was about St. Nicholas as the king of a fantasy land and his daughter, the Christmas princess. I have no idea what it's called, but around the holidays, I always secretly want to find it and read it. /amridiculouslylame. 

My Favorite Unconventional Love Stories

Something about snow and Christmas makes people think about love and want to do lovey things. Like watch chick flicks and read cutesy romantic novels. I do, anyway. I am also kind of pathetic, so maybe I am alone here. It snowed around 8 inches yesterday, and my roommate and I watched Love Actually. Correction: I put Love Actually into the DVD player and forced my roommate to watch it with me because I didn't want to watch it for the fourth time this semester by myself OMG MY LIFE IS SO SAD. So I thought it would be appropriate to post about my favorite unconventional love stories in books. Because conventional ones aren't memorable. I think unconventional love stories endure because everyone wishes they could be in one. The greater the obstacle, the greater the love, so they say.

1) The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (I have the biggest, most embarrassing girl crush on her) is totally one of the greatest love stories ever. I jumped on that bandwagon, yeah. I reread it recently, actually, and I still adore it. It's always on my night stand. If you have resisted reading it thus far and somehow haven't heard of it yet, it's about Henry and Clare as they struggle through the travails of life. It is pretty much a conventional marriage, except for the fact that Henry time travels involuntarily. So the first time Clare meets him, she is six. The first time he meets her, he is twenty-eight. It's the ultimate hipster, indie book full of hipster, indie references, but I don't care. It's epic. The ending is one of the greatest things I've ever read. Alternative story-telling at its best. Plus, I've bought this book twice. I lost my first copy somehow, so I purchased another one this semester because I wanted to reread it that badly.

2) Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin is one of the most creative concepts ever executed. Fifteen-year-old Liz dies at the opening, and she finds herself in a curious place called Elsewhere. It's the afterlife, which is very much like normal life, except that everyone ages backwards. When you become a newborn, you are sent back to Earth to be reborn. YES it is as amazing as it sounds. Her love interest, Owen, died in his thirties, but of course, by the time they meet, he is seventeen. God, this concept is so cool I can't even get over it. It's one of those ideas where you're like, why didn't I think of that and write it? It's written as though it were directed toward children, but it really isn't. I mean, it has sex and cursing and all these deep, philosophical things in it, so maybe not for anyone younger than twelve, but it's great for adults as long as you don't get turned off by the simplistic narration.

3) Stay With Me by Garret Freymann-Weyr is not really a romance. It's a story about a girl trying to understand her half-sister's suicide, and yet somehow manages to be an amazingly uplifting story. It's about suicide, but it's not about suicide. The inside flap says, "Stay With Me is a story about how impossible and important love is." And that's exactly what this novel is about. The unconventional part is that seventeen-year-old Leila gets into a relationship with thirty-one-year-old Eamon. Yet, it is incredibly sweet and mature, not at all creepy. The way it's written so normally is phenomenal and really says a lot about how great of a writer Freymann-Weyr is. I think this is all-around a fantastic story about love and about being comfortable with yourself and your sexuality. As well as being devastatingly romantic. One of my all-time favorite books.

Speaking of age differences, anybody notice all of the headlines about GYLLENSWIFT? Yes, that is apparently the new couple name for Jake Gyllenhaal (29) and Taylor Swift (20). Nine-year age difference. Not huge, I think, but a lot of people are squicked out because Taylor's only 20. If one of them was 40 and the other was 49, it wouldn't be a big deal at all. But I am all for it. If it's successful, they'll put some super pretty babies into the world and if it's unsuccessful, Taylor will have another Number 1 hit. I'm predicting the song title to be Screw You, Jake (seeing as Hey, Stephen and Dear John have already been taken). It's gonna be a great song. So best wishes to you, Gyllenswift, but I kind of hope you break up just so the world can be gifted with another musical fuck-you from TSwift. I live for those.

Dear Writers

Even though I haven't been around for a while, I think it's so cool that there are so many amazing writers on blogger. 

I've seen so many people put "Write and publish a novel" on their bucket lists. Because it's fashionable? Because it's glamorous? I don't know. It makes me frustrated though, since most of these people are never going to lift a finger to make it happen. If you want to be an author, what better time to do it than now? Why wait? What are you waiting for? A time when it's going to be easier? A time when you're going to be better? I don't think you're ever going to find a more convenient time. Writing is never convenient and you're never going to be better unless you write.

Right?

So for all of you guys who are already writing that novel, you're awesome.

Congratulations to all of you who participated in NaNoWriMo. It doesn't matter if you won or not, because you tried. And I hope you had fun!