2:21 in the AM

and I'm not sleepy. I've been on and off this weird sleeping schedule for awhile now. The other day when I was awakened from my 3-hour nap in the afternoon for a scheduled work out, fast as lightening, I just snatched up my blanket over my head and blocked out the world. And sleep reclaimed.

Maybe this sleeping cycle is what has been giving me some of my weird dreams lately?
But then again, I regularly remember my dreams. They're usually unusual and in full Technicolor.

I have a feeling though I won't be dreaming about cooing turtledoves soon. I closed the windows extra tight just for them :)

As an aside: If ever you are trying to remember your dreams in the early morning right when you wake up, try not to move! Staying still is key. Besides, surely we can all use a little more rest in the morning. I read that a very famous chef of our times (who is known for his cursing and very deep wrinkles) eats his breakfast before bedtime to save himself 15 minutes of shut-eye in the morning.

My Crazy Dream This Morning

Around 8:45am today, some stupid turtle doves woke me up with their rather loud cooing on my window sill -- windows were open but screen up, thank goodness. I was still tired, so I fell back asleep. Betwen then and 9:30am, I dreamt that the turtle doves had babies on my sill and they were cooing too. The cooing so disturbed my-dream-self that my-dream-self flicked off the dream baby turtle doves from the sill, where they left big wet spots. When I woke up to my cell phone alarm, I was kind of worried and so I went over to the window sill to look. No babies on or below :)

No more raw!

I think it was pretty easy to see by day 3, yesterday, that I cannot handle the raw food diet. At least not now. I've been getting so very antsy with the huge restriction on food. The worst thing was I thought about food even more than I normally do, which is a lot!

I am a little sad that this diet died so quietly. Maybe the lesson here is that I am an adamant creature of comfort, at least food-wise. Rather than telling myself that I can't have stuff, maybe I'll allow my body what it craves and live to 100 rather than 125 :)

Day 2 of "Raw" Food

got a raw deal. I didn't actually eat any raw foods :) That was a smile for guilt, not pleasure. Well maybe guilty pleasure since it was really good cooked food. But all that food was cooked food I already had that I was supposed to have anyway. Oh boy. That sounded like guilt if I ever did hear of any! Well, since my stock of cooked food is dwindling, I suppose only time will tell whether there will be day 3 of raw food or this diet is already over. Oh boy oh boy!

So today, I had

No breakfast = forgot to eat breakfast due to early morning meeting)
11:00AM Brunch = 2 cans of hearty beef soup (240x2=480Cal)
6:00PM Dinner = 1 slice of yellow cheese (70Cal), 1 cup of noodle soup (290Cal), 1 bag of steamed veggie buns (600Cal)

1440Cal is total intake.

Tune in again tomorrow folks.

Day 1 of Raw Food

I got up nice and early at 7:30am. And thus started my first day of raw foods.


~8am Breakfast = 1 medium-sized banana
12:30p Lunch= 1 large Golden Delicious and 1 small red, pie apple
5:30p Dinner= 12oz of tomato and eggs, 18oz of asparagus and pork, 1 cup instant Lunch maruchan noodles and 0.5oz Stella parmesan cheese.

Yeah :( Dinner didn't go quite as planned. Even though I was planning to finish the rest of the cooked food from my fridge, the load was much more than appropriate. I just got so hungry in the afternoon. Looks like I gotta pack better snacks than just apples. The first apple was great, crisp and sweet. The second apple was alright -- after that larger than fist-sized Golden Delicious apple though, I could not eat anymore apple, especially since the apple was warming up to room temperature from fridge temperature this morning.

I also had another weak moment at lunch, when I dreamt of dancing gyros with big fat mounds of sour cream and toasty warm pita bread. Oh boy!

So my score on this first day was one temptation conquered and one succumbed.
Onwards to day two!

Moral for day 1: There's a reason that the just ONE apple a day keeps the doctor away. It seems like that more than one may spur a rebellion from the body and yield a tummy ache! VARIETY is the spice of life.

New Season, New Times, New Habits, New Crowds

It's SPRING!!!
Yay for longer days and more sunlight. I can already see my hair sun-bleaching to a cheeky shade of deep auburn.

I'm getting out of hibernation as the weather is more inviting. And going outside definitely is a morale booster. Perhaps the best thing of all is going into stores again and seeing what things I'd like to buy.

I had always like clothes shopping, but after such a sedentary spell of sitting and working at a desk, I've gained much more weight than I should ever be allowed to. So much so that clothes shopping is no longer the shiny sparkly motivator at the end of a long tunnel of work.

That said, venturing into the shops also has a motivating effect of its own.

Because I truly do enjoy swimming between the racks, I've decided to go on a raw food diet to make the swim more enjoyable. I will start after I've finished eating the cooked food in the fridge. No definite end date in sight. We will see how I survive it.

My inspiration is Carol Alt, retired mannequin and recent reality TV star, who is looking fabulous at 50.


According to what I've read online, the raw food diet consists of
- veggies
- fruits
- nuts
- nothing cooked above 116degF (which rules out usual meats and eggs)

Out of all the articles that I read about eating raw foods,
this one offers the most advice -- from one who has tried it for 30 days
this one is the funniest -- "microwaved bacon" anyone?

I anticipate that my little food adventures will begin sometimes between middle of this week, which is rapidly approaching, to the weekend. And for as long as possible, without developing noticeable health deficits, I will continue my raw food experiment and hopefully report the results here :)

Here's to hopefully some happy eating. According to some sources, one can eat ~8.5 lbs of food per day on a raw food diet. That sounds like a lot of food to me. And a lot of food is just fine by me! Just looking at the images below makes me drool a little, which seems like a very promising start to me :)

The Bewitching Hour:

It's late at night again. And I'm up again :)
I truly think there is something magical about being up all alone while my part of the world sleeps. It's the kind of magic that makes you go pause and savor when you see a spider's web or take in the crispness of a cool, clear autumn day.

Now, more practically, I'm up because I'm studying. That also makes me take pause. But in a good way too. It's interesting stuff. Just like the spider's web or the autumn day. You can see it once, and see it again, but everytime there seems to be something a little more to see.

The moon over the Swiss Alps matches the tranquility of the bewitching hour perfectly.

I just wanted to say

You know who you are :)

Thanks for reading!

Cleaned House

today. In shining up the floor, I gave myself chafed hands and maid's knees.


And the vacuum cleaner did go poof, with the odor of burnt rubber :(


BUT... now it's all said and done, everything is SPARKLING CLEAN :)

Several Things Wiser :)

I.Melancholy revisited

So previously I had written about Trade (2007), the movie.
Through conversation with other people and a bit of reading on the web, I've come to a few conclusions:

A) Crimes like human trafficking are so complex that one person cannot ever hope to fight them alone. Instead, one person can spread the word about the existence of these crimes to as many people as will listen. By the power of a group of people -- by increased vigilance, pooled resources -- then something more substantial can be done.



B) One can educate themselves about this crime. Knowledge is truly power. When you know, you can then plan go to proceed. After being exposed to that human trafficking still exists and how, in Trade (2007), amateur porn footage can be produced by using these sex slaves, I can make a difference by encouraging people to boycott porn or at least porn of unknown sources.



C) Keep updated with other breaches of human rights. By creating an worldwide atmosphere of respect and justice for fellow human beings, we can decrease tolerance for such crimes. One good (and very prominent) website that I stumbled upon is Human Rights Watch -- news posted here is current and well researched.


II. A story for thought

So today I ate dinner with a peer, who is about the same age and socioeconomic standing as me. As we sat at dinner, this person started to belittle the achievements of a very accomplished and much older and worldlier person (who has traveled extensively because his work is very much in demand and also has one of the most respected positions in his line of work). After trying unsuccessfully to reason with my peer about the merits of the person being belittled, I very quickly finished dinner and left.

Some things about this peer of mine had been bothering me all day. The fact that this person does not like to read, does not like to study for betterment, expresses very little interest in anything even when explicitly asked. To add insult to injury, this person asks for my recommendations and then does not follow up on them. All of these things, I do not understand. I especially do not understand someone not wanting to be the best that they can be by educating themselves.

And so I googled "Why do people not want to be educated," and I found an article by RC, entitled "Do You Want a More Educated Mind? Seven Common Traps You Need to Avoid" at the following site



The article starts with
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
- Aristotle

That made me think. Sure, I was judging this person for judging someone else. But maybe I should have withheld my own judgment and heard them out.

And the first of the seven common traps was "1) You gravitate toward people that agree with you and reject those with differing viewpoints." By leaving this person quickly at dinner, I was doing exactly a corollary of trap one. Because we were in disagreement, I headed off.

And then there was trap three, "3) You label people who don’t match your way of thinking. There are two extremes for this… Labeling people as crazy, loony, far-out, or the other extreme, labeling people as close-minded, “asleep,” or lacking awareness." While this person was labeling someone else as boastful and untrustworthy, I was labeling this person as close-minded and unappreciative of others.

By doing so, I fell directly into trap six, "6) You don’t make the effort to understand an issue from other people’s perspectives."

As I read this article, I realized that while I thought of myself as pretty educated, perhaps a portion of my education is yet incomplete. I can still be much more open-minded.

Like James William Fulbright, US Senator, said,
"We must dare to think unthinkable thoughts. We must learn to explore all the options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing world."

The saddest thing in the world

After seeing this movie, I cried more than I have with any other movie. The movie is

Trade (2007)


Based on
The New York Times > Magazine > The Girls Next Door
By PETER LANDESMAN Published: January 25, 2004.

Please be advised that below the movie poster, I write a bit about my thoughts, which may contain spoilers to the movie.



Trade (2007) explores the trafficking of human sex slaves, captured against their will and/or tricked into slavery with false promises of a better life in America. Trade weaves several tales into one -- that of Veronica, a young Ukrainian woman who traveled to Mexico in hopes of better income in America; that of Adriana, a teenage Mexican girl who is kidnapped from the streets of Mexico City while riding a bicycle
bought by her brother with money he swindled from a US tourist with the false promise of prostitutes; that of Jorge, Adriana's brother, who goes across the continent to rescue his kidnapped sister; that of Raymond, the US cop who meets Jorge on his own mission to find his lost daughter, last seen some 10 years ago before being sold by her own junkie mother into the untraceable, unfathomable sex slave trade.

Women of whom Veronica was based had no more understanding of America than what little they extrapolated from the impossibly romanticized and distorted lens that is Hollywood movies. The promise of a faraway country brings hope and dreams, as it had before with so many generations of immigrants. Based on the pureness of hope that had built entire countries of immigrants, Trade explores how that hope is distorted and exploited into the most unimaginable nightmare.

Incredibly strong and faithful through the very end, Adriana delivers possibly the most memorable line of the movie, "Veronica te mira. No es demasiado tarde." She appeals to the common faith that binds her and her captor, Manuelo. With these simple and poignant exchange, the rawest of human emotions is captured -- fear, faith, hope, remorse, and forgiveness.

Unlike the two women protagonists in the film, the two male protagonists are depicted more multi-dimensionally. In addition to being victims, they are also victors and perpetrators of related crimes. Jorge pedaled images of prostitutes to men while his sister was being captured to be sold as a sex slave. Raymond committed adultery against his wife and produced a child who was forsaken by her own forsaken mother, his mistress.

In the last scene of the movie, Jorge angrily stabs the Russian leader of the trade ring. The Russian's prostitutes and customers scatter in a flurry of fear and confusion. And finally, the Russian's son yells, "Papa," in the street stained with his fathers blood. We see Jorge's face once more, now with anger tinged with uncertainty.

Post-script:
I normally don't write about things this serious in blogosphere, but this movie on the trade of sex slaves has particularly struck me. I have started to research this topic a bit. I've found several articles highlighting this issue since this decade's start, but haven't yet found anything that may lead to some change in this problem. I will continue to research this issue and report what I find here. Please stay tuned.

I'm so looking forward to my sleep-over

!!!!!!

Haven't had a sleep over since 3rd grade, when I slept over at Mrs. Walker's house (3rd grade teacher). She had the whole class over -- well, divided by gender. One night it was all the girls. The other night (which I wasn't around for) it was all the boys. And Mrs. Walker's husband, Barnacle Ben -- yep that's his real name -- hosted. Good times.
For the girls night, I painted my nails for the FIRST time :) This icky sparkly color of iridescent white. Sounds kind of nice, but really different in reality. Cheers to sleepovers.

This week

is Exam Week. Dun DUN DUNNNNNNNN.....

And I'm feeling very much like an ostrich, wide-eyed and alert. And always ready to bury my head in the sand.

More realistically, sometimes I WISH that I could put my head in the sand. And my behavioral manifestation of that wish is to put my head on the pillow and snooze. With sleep, I feel justified. Although it's not studying, it's making me more alert FOR studying. Moreoever, studies show that sleeping strengthens the desired mental connections.

Please allow me to present, the outrageous bird known as the ostrich:

Still ringing in my head

is the somber melody from yesterday. But it's been transposed from a minor up to a major :)

The lovely line yesterday came from the poem, Auguries of Innocence. Auguries is derived from the Latin, augur, which means soothsayer or omen. Penned by William Blake, the poem in its entirety can be found here. Now this is a man who really understood BEAUTIFUL.

A more somber melody might go like this:

"To see a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour."

I just remembered this line from Tomb Raider.

There is something so timeless and beautiful about a grain of sand that this truly lovely rhyme may not do it proper justice.

Today was kind of like just another a day in a perfectly ordinary string of days, and yet it was not. Somehow, just going through a simple day as today seemed strangely extraordinary. I got up. I looked at the brightly lit sky. I shivered in the deceptively bitter cold. I walked. I read. I listened. I talked. I learned. I laughed. I welled up with emotion. I smiled. I grew wistful.

I contemplated becoming a day older and hopefully wiser. I wonder how many people in the world had the exact same thought as I did today? How many people had it ever?

Good people of the world: Raise your hands please if you have.

Fat or Muscle

weighs more?
Or is this just a density issue?

On the latest episode of the show that pits "beauties" against "geeks," the cigar model (girl) and the owner of 10,000 comics (boy) were arguing about this precise issue. How very a propos for a little post-Turkey banter, eh? :)
















Comic-boy claimed that fat and muscle weigh the same, and it's just a density issue, in which muscle is denser than fat. Cigar modelette countered that muscle does indeed weigh more than fat.






























Hmm, well ....

If something is MORE DENSE, then that would mean that it has more mass divided by volume, which would mean that for the same volume, the denser stuff would ALSO WEIGH MORE.

And if something WEIGHS MORE than something else, then something would have to have more mass, which can be achieved by the something being more dense or there being just such a large volume of the something that the sheer amount of the something overwhelms a denser competitor. In short, something that WEIGHS MORE is ALSO MORE DENSE than something else of comparable volume.

Thus reason would indicate that for comparable volume of stuff, MORE DENSE and WEIGHS MORE are inseparable!

Same concept is shown at this link below, but with more sources
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=576481











Cigar modellete and comic-boy, you're BOTH right or wrong, depending on what kind of people you are :)

"Turkey"

always made me think twice. It's been such a long time since I started learning English as a second language that I don't remember whether I first learned about Turkey, the country, or turkey, the bird. I'm inclined to think that it was turkey the bird, because Mrs. McGrady and her army of lunch ladies at Captain elementary would make a rotating parade of mystery meats, of which turkey was one of the less mysterious and more trustworthy. But I digress.



I had always suspected that the bird had something to do with the eponymous country, but only today did I find out the real story from where else but Wikipedia! According to the all-knowing Wikipedia, the following is the story behind the naming of America's favorite cold season mascot between Halloween and Christmas:

When Europeans first encountered turkeys in the Americas, they incorrectly identified the birds as a type of guinea fowl (Numida meleagris), also known as a turkey-cock from its importation to Central Europe through Turkey, and the name of that country stuck as the name of the bird. The confusion is also reflected in the scientific name: meleagris is Greek for guinea-fowl.

The names for M. gallopavo in other languages also frequently reflect its exotic origins, seen from an Old World viewpoint, and add to the confusion about where turkeys actually came from. The many references to India seen in common names go back to a combination of two factors: first, the genuine belief that the newly-discovered Americas were in fact a part of Asia, and second, the tendency during that time to attribute exotic animals and foods to a place that symbolized far-off, exotic lands. The latter is reflected in terms like "Muscovy Duck" (which is from South America, not Muscovy). This was a major reason why the name "turkey-cock" stuck to Meleagris rather than to the guinea fowl (Numida meleagris): the Ottoman Empire represented the exotic East much the same as did India.

Several other birds which are sometimes called "turkeys" are not particularly closely related: the Australian brush-turkey is a megapode, and the bird sometimes known as the "Australian turkey" is in fact the Australian Bustard, a gruiform. The bird sometimes called a Water Turkey is actually an Anhinga (Anhinga rufa)

In a similar confusion, Spanish explorers thought the turkey to be a kind of peacock and called it by the same word, pavo. Today, the turkey is still called pavo in Spanish (except in Mexico where the Nahuatl-derived name guajalote is commonly used), and the peacock is commonly referred to as pavo real ("royal turkey").

So that's the story of Turkey and a turkey :) Hope it was edifying and entertaining for you as it was for me.

Gobble gobble.
Thanks for reading and Happy Thanksgiving!



A turkey in Turkey :)

Blood pooling

is not like car pooling.
While car pooling is a very environmentally-sound and useful thing, blood pooling is not. Unfortunately, blood pooling also makes my feet big.

On Saturday, I sat down to read almost the entire day, and as a result, the shoes that had fit with room to spare the previous day became 2 sizes too small on Saturday :( The shoes looked something like this below.














So the lesson here is heed your elders. Especially when they say to take a walk once in a while!


Big foot sighting ahead:

What goes up must come down

even if we're talking about the weather. Or especially when we talk about the weather.

Autumn has finally come to stay in earnest. Summer was nice while it lasted, but the temperature had to turn south ... er, north... sometime.

I'm loving this autumnal weather during the day, but am feeling the cold at night.
I like the cold air to breathe at night, but do not like the rest of my body to be cold.
I like to snuggle in bed to keep warm, but do not like to fall asleep. But that's another story!

A dash of yin and a dash of yang. Just like a a book my college roommate gave me -- it's her own work and a limited edition. Thanks Old Roomie! You cheer up my day.

And I do need some cheering up as this studying is making my hair fall out a little more than usual. Have been organizing study objectives though, which helps: Cross our fingers and cross out toes, look above and look below <-- that's good for the neck :)

And now I leave you with this: The yin and yang of autumnal leaves and their ghostly twins in the water.

O Happy Day!

I am at home and didn't have to go to work today :)
Sunday, the 7th day, Sabbath, day of rest, whatever you choose to call it, it's a good day for sleeping in and not being useful, thinks me. Don't you agree?

I've been doing research in a lab lately. And research is a b!tch. It involves working all 7 days of the week unfortunately. Although not the entire day is devoted to hard work, I still need to go in everyday (except for today) to keep my research subjects company :(

This lab does have its humorous eccentricities though. The one that I'll share here has to do with helium party balloons. The people at lab fill these shiny, rainbow-hued balloons with 95%O2+5%CO2 so that the gas can infuse into artificial cerebral spinal fluid (aCSF), which then washes over a 400um of tissue. The balloons keep the tissue alive! and since they also boost employee moral :) One can never have enough shiny party balloons at work!






My Rig



Balloon and Bottle



Wishing you a little good luck too :)