As a Chinese major, I’ll graduate in spring 2013.  That’s if, and only if, I take either Intermediate or Advanced Chinese in the summer, otherwise I’ll finish in 2014.

As a History major, I could graduate as early spring 2012 (though summer ‘12 would probably be more reasonable, haven’t broken it down that much), mainly due my semester’s worth of History credits from AP and SAT Subject Test exams.

However, my Chinese wouldn’t be good enough for the grad program I want to attend, so the earliest I could start grad school would be fall 2013.

I guess the only substantial (in outcome) difference is that I’d stop being such a drain on my mother quicker.

Pretty sure I’d enjoy being a Chinese major more, but due to my past, is doing what I enjoy a luxury I still have?

Chinese is going FAR better than expected (<brag>I got a perfect score on the last test!</brag>)

Jazz History, Intro to Landforms, and Critical Thinking are going as expected.

However, there’s a problem in my fifth class.

The class is Political Science 4255: Politics and Political Economy of East Asia.

The first problem is, I find political economy to be the most boring subfield of political science.

Second problem is, there’s a term paper.  The rough draft of which was due on Wednesday. The rough draft has no page limit, however, it’d be best of it is complete as possible.  The final draft is supposed to be 7-10 pages.

As of Wednesday, I had a quarter of a page.  I didn’t bother turning it in, telling myself I would turn it in the next day.

It is now Friday night and I still have a quarter of a page.  I’m docked 15 points every day it’s late. After running the numbers, I can still pull off an A- in the class (which counts as an A for HOPE and for transferring to UGA) if I turn it in by Saturday and get at least 90s on the final exam and the final draft of the paper (25% and 30% of my final grade respectively).

The topic of my paper is the 1996 Taiwanese Presidential election (first democratic presidential election in the Island’s history!), specifically on how the Taiwan Straits Crisis affected the electoral outcome, if at all.

You’d thinking I’d be working on this paper right now, but for some reason, I have no motivation at all to do it.  I can hardly think about working on it, let alone doing it.

I’m honestly not sure why not.

Truth be told, all I want to do is stay in bed and stare at the ceiling.  I haven’t exercised in close to two weeks, I can barely get myself to do work for any of my classes (even Chinese), and I’m afraid I’m starting to relapse.  Pretty shitty time for it to happen as well.

Did I mention I’m transferring to UGA?  Well, as long as I don’t fail a class this term, I start at UGA in January as a Chinese Language and LIterature major.

There are some other issues going on in my life right now, but they’re pretty much business as usual, you know, loneliness/not belonging, feelings of inadequacy due to my college history and choice of major, etc etc.

I realize that earlier I said I was gonna write on certain topics.  No more promises of that sort, I’m probably not gonna keep them, and I feel far too bad about them.  Posts will come when they come.

南無阿彌陀佛

WTF?!

• Reflections on my first term at GSU
• Why I’m filing transfer apps
• I WILL FINISH the 228 POSTS.  I PROMISE.

As usual, I go to the 2nd floor of the library and sit in the skybridge, mainly because I like looking out at Downtown Atlanta on my small breaks from studying.

While on one of these breaks, I started thinking about what I was doing in previous summers at about the same time.

This time, last year, there was a good chance I would be sitting in Cabot Science Library in the Harvard Science Center, gazing out the windows at Cambrege (well….the Yard) while making my way through Calc II homework.

A year before that, the summer of ’08, I was having my 2nd day of work at OfficeMax, working the cash register, and gazing out the windows to the old motor mile of Anniston, AL.

Before that, summer of ’07, I was staring out the windows of my house trying to prep myself for the academic and athletic rigors of MIT.

Coming back full circle, it’s now the summer of ’10, and I’m an Asian Studies major at GSU (which is interesting to me for reasons I’ll talk about in a later post) and training for the Atlanta Half-Marathon.

I guess gazing out the window is a recurring theme in my life.  I’ve always been a bit of a dreamer, longing for what I can’t/don’t have.  It’s really a problem of mine.

One thing I keep thinking about is how my life would be different if I went to Princeton after high school instead of MIT.  Honestly, I tend to think my life would be better, since I would do far better in the liberal arts environment of Princeton than the, I guess, “liberal sciences” environment of MIT.

I also have the bad habit of somehow thinking that my life is waste now.

Naturally, this thought pattern isn’t pretty fucking terrible, and serves no purpose other than making me feel like complete shit and a dumbass.

Also, if I’d taken that different path, who the fuck knows how I would be, as a person, right now.  Let alone all the cats that I met in Cambridge that I probably wouldn’t have met/gotten to know otherwise.

Not really sure where I’m going with this, but whatever.

Test in 8 hours.

Peace.

Though in my opinion, if you haven’t seen it, you should just read this, as whatever shit I write will be much better than that fucking movie. So Superman returns from his five year trip to the remains of Krypton. He lands back in Kansas, reminiscent of his first landing.

Soon after, he commits his first act of douchebaggery. His dog wishes to play fetch with him. What does Superman do? He throws it as hard as he can, of course. The ball probably left earth orbit. His dog runs forward a bit, and then looks back with a whimper and a look on its face like, “you ass”. Who can argue with the lovable Golden Retriever?

Also, let’s look at Brandon Routh. Yes, the man is 6’3″, 235 pounds, but that’s all in his legs. Routh Superman looks like he couldn’t win a street fight, let alone lift Kryptonite Mountains [see below]. I have to admit though, he does a perfect “Clark Kent is a fucking loser” routine.

Then Lex Luthor comes in. Apparently, he married an old woman and showed her pleasures she never could of imagined, or pleasures out of this world. The exact wording doesn’t matter. What matter is, what exactly are these pleasures, and can they be shown without a NC-17 rating? You know, I don’t even want to know the answer to that question, because the lady looks 115. Whatever moral system you adhere to, I think we can all agree that that’s just fucking nasty. In any case, a la Anna Nicole, he has all her money now.

So then he goes to the Arctic, storms Superman’s Fortress of SOlitude, and takes all of his shit. Now I want to complain about accuracy with the source material. Sure, it’s in the arctic you say, it should be safe, you say. Well, obviously not. Apparently, not only is movie Superman a douchebag, he’s also an idiot. Comic book Superman at least has enough sense to lock his shit up. Also, in the comic books, everything in his fortress, information wise, is DNA encoded. Apparently movie Jor-El isn’t smart enough for this, and he’ll call anybody who waltzes up into the Fortress his son. I mean, look at Superman II, it wouldn’t be the first time people other than Superman have been in the Fortress, surely the great and wise Jor-El, who predicted his planet exploding ahead of all the other scientists in his advanced civilization, who had enough foresight to not only get his son off said planet, but bring with him an object that would build him a fucking fortress, could foresee the need to put a security system in said fortress.

Guess not.

Skip a few scenes, and Lois Lane is on a plane that has a space shuttle attached to it, and the space shuttle launches from the top of the plane. Can anybody say bad fucking idea? I can. Naturally, something goes wrong, though no fault of the people in control of this beast, and the shuttle starts exiting the atmosphere with the plane still attached.

Oops.

Skip some bullshit, and Superman is trying to stop the plane from smashing into the ground. First, he grabs the wing. Well, apparently the son is no smarter than the father. The plane is going fast as fuck towards the ground, and pulling back on the wing is just gonna make the wing tear off. Which it does. Which makes Superman scramble and he narrowly averts killing a whole stadium full of people.

Good job, Supes.

Then comes the most bad ass scene ever. The real reason everybody came to see this movie. And that’s to see Superman stop a bullet with his eye. We all knew he could do it theoretically, but we never actually SAW it. And then Bryan Singer answered all our prayers and put it in this movie. Thank you, Bryan.

Superman then proceeds to make up with Lois for five years of absence and a baby (more later). How does he do this? He grabs her and flies around with her. THAT’S IT. I know there are a whole bunch of men in the world who wished they could fly after seeing this.

Then the big rotating planet thing on top of the Daily Planet falls off. Superman catches. Yay. And then he does the douchiest thing ever. He puts it down, and crushes, some poor schmo’s Mercedes. Sure, you probably saved his life, but you crushed his car. Think about the financial hardship Superman has now put that man through. Will Superman come back and help this man financially?

Of course not.

Also, the man had a car in an area based on New York City. You know the traffic is terrible, but he probably needed it for work or something. Can you imagine going to your boss and saying you’re late because Superman crushed your car?

Next thing you know, Lex Luthor is creating hugeass Kryptonite landmasses in the middle of the fucking ocean.

Sure, I can go with that.

What I can’t go with is Superman picking the ENTIRE island up and taking it into space. An entire island made up of the shit that instantly weakens him and will kill him. Not only that, but he still has a shard of Kryptonite inside him?

Now at first, it can be explained away, since he drills deep into the Earth and picks it up that way. Soon after though, the Kryptonite starts breaking through, and yet he manages to overcome this and the Kryptonite inside him to not only pick up this huge ass island, which would be pushing it for him normally, but to launch it into space?

I think the official term for this is “suspension of disbelief”.

I call it bullshit.

Not only that, but he pushes it into space so weakly, that it’s probably still in Earth Orbit ready to fuck somebody’s day up.

So let’s talk about Superman’s kid. This movie takes place five years after Superman II, and in Superman II, Supes took Lois to the Fortress of Solitude for a little….action.

Apparently, he didn’t wrap it up.

And now Lois is the baby mama. Five years later, he knows that this kid is his child, and yet he won’t tell the child, or Richard White, the guy who thinks he’s the father.

“18 years, got you for 18 years, and on the 18th birthday he found out it wasn’t his?”

And then at the end of the movie, he whispers to his kid while the kid is asleep. Like he’s gonna protect his kid anymore than some random guy in the world. As if that counts.

I didn’t meet my father until I was 14, and let me just say, it doesn’t fucking count.

And apparently, this kid won’t even make it to 14, because rumor has it, he dies in the next movie. Come on DC, making him was lame enough, now you have to kill him off?

Two lames don’t make an awesome.

Apparently, DC is all about abdicating your duty to things you create.

Also, to add insult to injury, they made Superman a dead-beat dad to make him “more relatable” to us. I mean, really?

Really?

Let alone the whole fact Superman was created was so that people can have an ideal to aspire to. An ideal of goodness and justness, and of helping your fellow man. Now we should aspire to be dead-beat dads.

More relatable?

Really?

4/10 (At least it’s better than Superman III and IV)

Update 2010: You know, at the time I thought it was better than III/IV, but Superman III had Richard Pryor which makes it >> Superman Returns.

This pictures makes me so happy.

Now, I don’t actually live in Massachusetts anymore, and I can get medical insurance that is roughly the same for about a third of the price.

This weekend I set out to do that.

I have been rejected from every insurance company I have applied to.

Why?

“Major Depression within the past 12 months.”

So basically, I’m essentially uninsurable for the next year.  Actually, probably longer than that, since they asked* if I’d suffered from major depression in the past 5-10 years, so if I lose the insurance I have now, I’m pretty much fucked if something happens until 2014.

So, uh…guess this wouldn’t be the best time in my life to start doing triathlons, eh?

*: I realize I could just lie on the applications, but that’s not how I roll. Not like they wouldn’t see my medical records anyway.

A quick diversion: I got into GSU, so I had a lil celebratory Manischewitz.  You know, passover, represent.  Not like I believe in any of that, but I’ll rep anyway.

Back to my main point, sometimes I think I might, deep down, be a race traitor.  To be fair, it’s 2010, not 1910.  I’m not sure the race traitor concept is even valid today.

But like, I’m an east asian studies major or whatever.  I read Taipei Times everyday along with a slew of other asia related things.  I went to the bookstore last weekend and bought three books: China Safari, Factory Girls, and The Rape of Nanking.

I greatly prefer a few types of chinese cuisine to Soul Food (I’m from Alabama/Georgia.  We eat soul food. Except chitlins.  If you still eat chitlins, you should probably shoot yourself.  But not fatally.)

In fact, in a perfect world, that’s probably all I’d eat (not soul food, the other one).

And sometimes I think I’d rather live in E. Asia, xenophobia and all, than here.  Then I realize that A) I’ve never been there which means that B) shit could be far worse there than here.

(Slightly unrelated, the other day my mother said that she thinks if I get married, it’ll be to an asian woman?  Uh..wtf? so I’m an east asian studies major so I’m probably gonna marry an asian woman?  I’ll rage about this another day)

But sometimes I wonder, shouldn’t I be like, be an afro-american or african studies major?  Wouldn’t that be…proper?

But what the fuck is proper?  And why should I be limited to a course of study because of my ancestral origins?

of course not, right?  cuz that’s some racist shit, right?

Speaking of race traitors, Michael Steele? Y/N.  Also, his spending habits are HILARIOUS.  And I guess it’s kinda bad I thought “typical” when I saw them.  Not because he was a republican, but because he was black.  Yay internalized racism.

Also, if Steele is one, would Obama be one too?  Democrats ain’t doing much better.  Okay, they’ve been doing far more than the Republicans, I shouldn’t be too harsh on the man.  For all the people calling him socialist though, he’s too capitalistic for my tastes.

Anyway, I think the race traitor/Uncle Tom paradigm is a dead one and one that should be left dead.

But maybe I just think that because I’m a race traitor.

There has been a rash of UK shows ported to American television recently.  Some notable examples I can think of off the top of my head are The Office and American Idol (adapted from Pop Idol).

The latest in these series of ports is a show called Who Do You Think You Are?, which takes a notable person, and devotes an entire episode to their genealogy.  It’s the latest in a series of genealogy shows that do just this, though most of these shows have been restricted to PBS. (Random fact: Eva Longoria and YoYo Ma share a common ancestor within the last 250 years, courtesy of Faces of America hosted by Skip Gates, who also hosted African American Lives 1-2, a show in the same vein as the aforementioned).*

I’ve been keeping up with WDYTYA? and it’s causing me to think about how much I know, or rather, how little I know, about my father’s family.

I, like half of my generation of Afro-Americans, was raised in a single-mother household.  I didn’t meet my father until I was 14 years old (that I can remember), and I’ve seen him a handful of times since then.

My parents were married three years, and divorced when I was two.  I’ve never asked why, because honestly, I’ve never really cared.  The only reason I know when they divorced is because I needed the date the divorced was finalized for my college and financial aid applications.

Throughout my childhood, I was never that curious about my father, only asking questions after seeing tons of divorced kids on tv.  ”Does he pay child support?” was one of these tv-prompted questions. ( “None of your business” was the answer, btw.)

I remember the exact date I met my father (and his younger brother) for the first time, not because it was a particularly important meeting for me, but because it was my mother’s birthday.  (I actually have a very funny story, possibly two, related to this meeting.  Ask me privately, and I’ll tell you.)

The meeting was very awkward for me.  Not because there here was this long lost hole in my life, but because there was a man sitting next to me whom I’m expected to show some sort of filial piety to, but who was a complete stranger who I didn’t care that much about, except I’m supposed to care, so that means I should, right?

Skipping a few years and more awkward encounters and phone calls and we come to the weekend after my high school graduation, which my father attended.  Apparently, his side of the family were having a family reunion, and a large chunk of my family was in the state, so my father, his brother, and I drove out to meet them.

It was very…strange. Physically speaking, I am very much a Robinson.  Not only that, but my first cousin (my aunt’s youngest child) and I look almost identical.  He is about 3″ taller, and heavier built, but if you haven’t seen me in a minute and then ran into him, you would be hard pressed to tell the difference.  This is like some George V/Nicholas II shit.

Nicholas II of Russia and George V of the UK. Also first cousins.

It’s so very weird to be around people who you resemble so strongly, and yet know little about.

For example, I know little to nothing about my father’s ancestors.  I don’t even know my paternal grandmother’s name.  I know that she may have been half-Native and that she was at my parents’ wedding.  According to mother, she was light skinned and had unusually long hair for a black woman.  That’s it.  Oh, apparently she’s deceased.

The same pretty much goes for my paternal grandfather.  I actually know his name though, only because I share it.  My father and his siblings were born and raised up North, but as the family reunion they went to was in Alabama and for his side of the family, I feel as if my grandfather was born in Alabama.  I also believe he died before my parents married.  According to my mother, he was short and fat, and about my skin tone.

Watching all these genealogy shows have made me very curious about my father’s side of the family, partially because I know so much about my mother’s side.  Hell, I could probably write a book about my maternal grandfather’s family and I could contribute pretty heavily to one about my maternal grandmother’s.

All I would have to do is pick up the phone and call my father.  I just don’t feel…comfortable doing that.  He’s called me a fair amount in the past year, and most of the time I simply don’t answer.  My family (I just noticed the terminology I use.  My mother’s family is “my family” and my father’s family is “my father’s family) says I should stop holding punishing him, but it really isn’t an act of punishment, at least not consciously.  It is awkward to talk to him, for various reasons, and add that to the funk I’ve been in the past few years and that shit is just not happening.

Oh well, I’ll do some preliminary digging on the internet, and then I guess I’ll have to work up the nerve to call my father when that runs out.

* Is it proper to put the ending punctuation inside or outside the parenthesis?  It’s been three years since I’ve had a writing class, and I honestly don’t remember silly things like that.