Long-Distance Love

Less than 48 hours.  That’s how long Anran was here this weekend.  There are people who judge me when I say that I get torn over prospective summer plans because of the fact that I want to have time to be home with my boyfriend, and to those people I say, what is the problem with wanting to actually BE in your relationship?  Still, there are many people in far more difficult situations than ours, and I consider myself lucky that I at least get two full days or so out of every month to spend with Anran.

Personally, I think one of the major pitfalls for a lot of couples in long-distance relationships is that they put too much pressure on themselves to have magical, perfect visits.  I know the idea is that you barely get to see your significant other and therefore want to make the most of your time, but it’s so much better to just live life like normal.  After all, it’s not like you get to have that either, and in the end when you’re with someone you love it really doesn’t matter what you’re doing, only that you’re with them.

My favorite part of the weekend was when, after stopping by the grad library to pick up a bunch of books for a presentation of mine, we sat at a table in Biggby coffee with our drinks and a cupcake.  Anran worked on organizing some data for work, and I read up on Bakhtin and Bourdieu.  It sounds boring and lame, but it was just so nice to be able to live our lives in the presence of each other for once, instead of through phone calls and IMs.  A small taste of what we’ll eventually have someday.  Never ever take for granted the value of  mundane time spent with loved ones, because even those are precious moments to be cherished.

Not dead!

I started a tumblr.  I mostly keep this blog to keep in touch with certain people in my life, but when I do write in it, I try to keep it to posts of substantial content, which can be challenging due to the busy life that I maintain.  Tumblr is proving to be a great way to just share quick tidbits, and I’m really enjoying it as an add-on to blogging.

Life post-break hit the ground running, and things have been really exciting back in Michigan.  I had my first real lesson with Mr. Berofsky (amazing!), moderated a book club session for work, began rehearsing with my new trio, and have been keeping busy with practicing and homework.  That said, I’ve been struggling a lot lately with the difficulties involved in maintaining a long-distance relationship.  This is our third year of long-distance, and while I would never give up on it and do believe we can make it work, these days I feel it really wearing me down.  Luckily Anran surprised me by letting me know he’d be visiting this upcoming weekend!  And more importantly, he ordered cheese from Zingerman’s.

So that’s where things stand for now: productivity and mild heartsick, and the attempt to make the most of my life here.

Most Listened in 2009

Somewhat inaccurate due to how much I tend to listen to music on youtube, but still interesting!  I’m amused that some tracks off the BSG soundtrack made it in there.

Year in Review

On Tuesday, as we rode home from the metro after an epic day of DC adventures, a friend of mine commented that 23 is supposed to be a good year.  And while I hadn’t heard that before, I thought about it and realized that 23 has in fact been good to me, and that 2009 has been a really fantastic year.  This past year was all about new beginnings, finally coming out of a two-year depression, and moving on to the next phase in my life.  So without further ado, the highlights reel!

January
+ Rang in the new year with Ivy and Paul at Ceiba. Fixed price dinner and free champagne!
+ Newport beach with the family. Nonstop Vietnamese food and thrift/consignment shopping.
+ Began roasting whole chickens on my own!

February
+ Ruby and Anran visit me for the best Valentine’s day of my life.
+ I take my University of Michigan DMA audition! I then proceed to panic for a month.

March
+ My little sister gives me a 50mm f/1.8 lens as an early birthday present.
+ Spring break turns out to be awesomely epic, with tons of eating and quality time with friends.
+ Anran and I celebrate our two year anniversary at CityZen. Our relationship continues to get better every day.

April
+ Accepted into UMich for DMA! Holy smokes I’m going to be a DOCTOR OF MUSIC.
+ 23rd birthday! I spend it writing a massive paper on Mahler 9. Ah grad school.
+ Finish my 365 Project! Learned to finally be okay with being in photographs. Now I take self-portraits all the time and photography life constantly.
+ For my last day at work at my tutoring job through America Reads, my string quartet does an educational presentation on classical music and teamwork. I get cards from all the kids! Working with these children has opened my eyes both about the world around me and about what I want to do in life.

May
+ On May 18th I graduate from CIM as a Master of Music. It turns out to be one of the most meaningful days of my life.
+ Anran comes on a family vacation for the first time. We go to Cape Cod, eat lots of lobster, buy tons of used books, and go whale watching!

June, July, August
+ Summer awesomeness. Epic adventures with some of my most favorite people in the world. Fantastic food.
+ Anran and I start growing herbs and zucchinis. Unfortunately my cats eat all the herb seedlings, but the zucchinis actually work out!
+ I work my first office job as a student intern at the IRS.
+ My parents take my little sister and me to Buffalo, NY to see where they used to live when they first met.

September
+ Officially moved in to my new apartment in Michigan. New life as a doctoral student! The return to long-distance, blah.
+ I start babysitting for my violin teachers. Loooove their kids, so so so much. Oh man I wanna have kids.
+ My mom starts reaching out to me, and for the first time in my life I start feeling like I have a real realtionship with my family.
+ SUFJAN STEVENS OH MY GOSH. Ah-may-zing.
+ I start working in the education department at UMS. Part of why I wanted to do a DMA was to narrow my focus, yet instead I end up expanding my horizons.

October
+ School school school! Not much happened in October. My little sister wants it mentioned that she turned 19.
+ I get lunch with a girl I haven’t seen since elementary school. The internet makes the world smaller!

November
+ My family visits!
+ On a whim, I fly out to Houston, Texas for my best friend’s 2nd MM recital. It turns out to be well worth the $300.
+ My mom gets blood clots again and is hospitalized after they move to her lungs, so I skip town and come home early for Thanksgiving break. Then my dad falls off a ladder and fractures two fingers.
+ I start experimenting heavily with off-camera lighting.

December
+ Anran takes a med school interview at the Cleveland Clinic, so I meet up with him and we turn it into a fun weekend. Fingers crossed that he gets in, as it would pretty much be ideal for us!
+ Epic winter break. Adventures with two of my best friends, lots of amazing food, and good times all around. The only massive downer is that Anran is in Hawaii for the majority of my break.
+ Low key New Year’s Eve with my little sister, Ivy and Paul.

So eventful! I hope that 2010 brings about an even higher level of personal growth and achievement. Happy new year to everyone!

The Little Things

+ Long-distance relationships suck, but my boyfriend buys me take-out when I get stressed out as his way of trying to show support.  Yay food!

+ I got rickrolled by my teacher’s six year old son.

+ Speaking of my teacher’s son, oh my gosh love.  I pretty much babysit for the emotional therapy. Who doesn’t like playing games and reading in bed and being told how nice and fun you are?

+ Also, KID PIX.

+ I played the most meaningful concert of my life thus far this weekend.  It was for a small group of elderly people with slight dementia.  I talked to them about the history of solo violin music, what complications arise in the genre, the difference between Bach Sonatas and Partitas, etc. etc.  On a personal level, it was probably the most effective I’ve been at speaking intelligently but accessibly about music, plus the playing went well and they really loved it.

+ White Christmas!  And old movies in general.

+ Roadtrip to Cleveland FRIDAY, home MONDAY.

Happy Spamsgiving!

A word on spam.  When we were kids we mostly drove on vacations instead of flying, and we most often went to Florida because my family has a timeshare in Orlando.  After driving for a good 13+ hours we would arrive at our destination hungry and tired, so my mom would fry up some spam, which we would eat with rice.  Spam always reminds me of family and vacation!  People might call it gross, but when you hate on spam you’re pretty much knocking one of my cherished childhood memories.  Lay off the spam hate.

Anyway, my parents were supposed to go on a cruise this Thanksgiving, but their plans were sadly canceled because of a health emergency; my mom was in the hospital from Friday night until Sunday.  My mom was pretty bummed, so out of a sense of nostalgia we fried up some spam and put it in different dishes.  I made spam with brussel sprouts, and Anran helped whip up some spam fried rice!  My dad even commented that it smelled like vacation.  And of course we had traditional Thanksgiving dishes too.  My dad went out and bought a last minute turkey, and I cooked some soy sauce and honey salmon with red peppers, scallions and caramelized onion.  For dinner my sister and I did stop by my boyfriend’s family’s Thanksgiving party, but we didn’t stay too long so that we could come home and bring back food for my parents.

I have a lot to be thankful for in my life, but right now most of all my family is pretty thankful that my mom is doing well.  My mom was a Vietnam war refugee and is ridiculously hardcore.  Doctors are baffled by how few symptoms she’s showing and how outwardly healthy she appears!  My mom and I have struggled a lot with our relationship for most of my life, but things have very recently turned around and for once I feel like we are doing really well.  So I’m beyond grateful for both that and her (hopefully) speedy recovery.

Happy Thanksgiving, all!

Weekend in Pictures

Oh gosh I miss having Keith in my life.

Our Alpine Symphony

In general, musicians don’t know how to take compliments.  Part of it stems from the fact that we spend all of our training dealing with criticism.  You only have so much time for lessons, coachings, and rehearsals, so of course most of that time will be spent on what to improve instead of wasting it on what was good.  The work you do on your own time is filled with constant self-criticism.  We get really good at noticing what’s wrong and ignoring what’s right.

For me, what this means is that I have a tendency to work nonstop until I run myself into the ground.  And keep going.  I just want to do everything!  I want to be the best violinist that I can be, but I also love the academic work.  And my job at UMS?  Loooove it.  But it’s a lot, and I end up juggling a lot of work with little to no allowance for stress relief.  Weekends mean time to catch up on work!  My social life mostly consists of babysitting.  I’m driven by my constant desire to improve, and no matter how many compliments I get about my achievements, it doesn’t ever feel like enough.

Lately I’ve been feeling a bit like I’m drowning.  I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in weeks, and I’m struggling with some personal demons that I really don’t have time for.  But I can’t take that as an excuse, so I’ve just been plowing through anyway.  I’m clearly tired though; in an email to one of my professors on Monday I accidentally called him by the name of one of my former CIM professors, and I always triple read my emails and yet didn’t catch the mistake.

In the spirit of trying to give myself a break, I’m going to Texas this weekend for my close friend Keith’s final MM recital!  Oh gosh, words can’t even explain.  Except I’m totally freaking out about not getting enough work done this weekend.  I want to practice and work on my papers!  Not to mention the guilt I feel over the financial aspects of the trip.  But based on my recent physical and mental health, I think that this is exactly what I need.  Keith rejuvenates my soul!  As great as my relationship is with Anran, I just need a friend like Keith to gush incoherently over works of music, jam, and to be an all around musical ninja dreamer with.  It’s going to be awesome!

And I can do work on the plane.

Nostalgic Rambling

What is it about small spherical foods that are so enjoyable?  Dippin’ Dots, for example.  Ice cream is great and all, but oh my gosh Dippin’ Dots make me so happy.  I remember the excitement I felt when I first discovered Dippin’ Dots way back in middle school, but I also STILL get just as excited when I eat Dippin’ Dots now.  And tapioca!  Little pearls of tapioca!  I love tapioca.  Maybe this says more about me as a person than about the joys brought about by small round foods.  But in the same vein, last week my roommate received a package containing five small tins of Godiva Chocoiste Dark Chocolate Pearls.  Thank goodness for generous, sharing roommates.  Chocolate is great and all, but something about little pearls of chocolate is even better.  Good things come in small packages!

Anyway, foods aside, this whole past week has been filled with nostalgia.  It started with Kenya.  I’m currently putting together the agenda for a book club session on Joseph Lemasolai Lekuton’s Facing the Lion: Growing up Maasai on the African Savanna for work, and consequently I was having a serious discussion with my boss about Kenya.  Secretly I had this running through my head during our entire conversation.   KENYA!  Man, does anyone else remember this from high school?  We were all about the Kenya song!  And from there that got me curious about all those other old popular flash videos and whatnot from high school and guys, all I can say is what the hell, the internet was so weird.  Sure, the internet is still weird now, but that was just….a whole different kind of weird.  Badger badger badger badger mushroom.  And speaking of internet weirdness, I’m sorry but why are LOLcats still popular?  This trend has lasted for far too long.

My taste in the internet may have evolved in the past however many years, but the movies that I loved?  Oh man, still love them just as much, if not more.  I ended up running Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Princess Mononoke as background movies while practicing/doing homework over the course of the weekend.  Out of the three I hadn’t seen Eternal Sunshine in the longest amount of time, and I was shocked first by the fact that I had forgotten how much I loved the film, but also by how it affected me in a much different way now than it did my high school self.  Oh the joys of new dimensions to old loves!

Let’s get some Dippin’ Dots and watch old films together.

Blast from the Past

The older I get, the more I enjoy dressing up and putting together outfits.  But despite that fact, I still spend a lot of time in my scrubby 12-year-old boy clothes.  Part of it is out of self-consciousness and fear of judgment, but an equally large part of it is time.  I’m not comfortable enough yet to be able to throw on quick cute outfits.  Even this summer when I worked an office job and dressed nicely every day, my little sister and I would decide on our outfits the night before.  I’m just slow and insecure!  And I don’t go out very much these days, what with all the schoolwork and my job(s).

But on Sunday I had lunch plans with a long lost friend, so it was a perfect excuse to feel pretty!  She was my best friend in 5th grade, but I left for a middle school magnet program and we lost touch, after which her family moved anyway (this was pre-AIM, how crazy is that!).  With the creation of Facebook she tracked me down again about four or five years ago, but now we both happen to be at the University of Michigan for grad school, so we decided to meet up for lunch.

Thanks to a recommendation from my friend Kan, we hit up Cafe Zola for crepes.  Super delicious!  I got a hot cocoa and a Florentine crepe, and she got a cafe mocha and the Champignon crepe (my second choice!).  We ended up talking for a little over an hour, and it’s crazy how oddly parallel aspects of our lives have been!  I’m hoping we can rekindle our friendship and hang out again soon.

Michigan weather has been really gorgeous lately, so I figured I’d wear a dress while I still could.  The cardigan and tights were plenty to keep me warm!

Outfit Details:

Cardigan – Thrifted
Dress – Gap, Thrifted
Belt – Bebe, Gift from my sister
Houndstooth Tights – Spanx!
Shoes – Max Mara, Thrifted
Necklace – Street vendor?

Speaking of blasts from the past, my high school five year reunion is coming up.  Man!  I don’t really remember high school anymore, plus I was kind of over high school before it began,  so I doubt that I’ll go.  But we’ll see.  Boy time flies.