islanded in a stream of stars

First of all, many happy returns to st_crispins on her rather belated birthday! I suspect I've missed a number of other birthdays, too, since I last posted a few months ago - hope they were all good ones :) Thanks to eldritchhobbit and agentxpndble

I do feel somewhat guilty about not posting in months - I've been wrangling with writing an entry for weeks but keep being tied up with more pressing matters with eminent deadlines. I've been keeping up with reading entries but rather lax in commenting :( It's strange to realize that in approximately a month's time I'll be a grad student, working on my master's in gerontology. Unlike many of my friends of a similar age, I have a year before I'm confronted with the financial realities of being an adult. In other news, it's been six years and nine days since my friend Cathy passed away, and it's the first time when I can honestly say I'm at peace with what happened to her.

Sometimes I wonder what her life would've been like if she had lived past her teens, but I recognize the futility of immersing myself in the potential energy left of a live left behind. All too often we mourn those who die young for who they could have become (or rather, who we wanted them to become), less so for who they actually were. Reminiscing about my friend is a shadow exercise in assessing my own life. Lately I've been wondering about all those other lives I've could've inhabited but have willingly relinquished to the tail ends of the probability curve. Back in high school, I was expected to go to Stanford, maybe an Ivy, and then go to law school because that's what relatively enculturated Asian/immigrant parents "strongly" recommend, outside of med school and engineering. Needless to say, I ended up at a university that used to be known for its football team but has the most badass gerontology department in the nation. (I can't believe I just juxtaposed "badass" and "gerontology" in all due seriousness.) Thankfully, my parents have been really supportive in letting me figure out my career. That, and they probably got tired of me babbling about constitutional issues at the dinner table when I was taking AP US History, in that pseudo precocious way that ambitious but not really brilliant high school students tend to talk.

( More youthfully self-centered ramblings about my future )

In other news, my "gentleman caller" as my mother refers to him, will be meeting my godparents over dinner in two weeks :) I suspect that extremely nerdy conversations will be taking place, given that Weird Al's "White and Nerdy" might as well have been written the gentleman caller, and my godfather (dad's old roommate) is rumored to have been complicit in some wicked MIT pranks back in his college days. The fiery readhead (FR for short), as dragonfly66 has nicknamed him, will be joining me the first few days of winter break after we're done with finals next Thursday. If any folks from the Bay Area are around the 17th to the 20th want to meet up with both of us, that'd be tremendously exciting!

I've never understood the vitriol about Valentine's Day. Sure, $14.7 billion spent on gifts this year as a proxy for love strikes me as patently ridiculous; what scares me even more is that total expenditures related to this holiday's festivities are at a record low. But the true sentiment behind the day shouldn't arouse so much bitterness and ire. Believe me, I'm as familiar with heartsickness as the next person, but I refuse to let that prevent me from recognizing all there is for which I'm grateful.

I see Valentine's Day the way I see Thanksgiving and Christmas: an opportunity to reflect on what I have that I all too frequently overlook. This day is a celebration of love; I just expand that definition of love to something beyond the romantic kind.

When I think of love, I think of my family and friends and the friends I secretly count as family. I honestly can't imagine what my life would be without you. Call me a romantic, but I find it tragic how often we don't notice or acknowledge all those things that make us smile as we realize that yes, someone out there does care about us.

Love is someone checking in to see how I'm doing after angsting about a bad day. Love is someone going out of their way to send you a DVD featuring your favorite actor or a CD featuring your favorite composer. Love is someone baking green tea pound cake just for the fun of it and not minding when you end up eating most of it. Love is someone letting you continually bum rides off of her even though she refuses to let you pay for gas. Love is someone writing you a story or sharing a favorite poem. Love is someone washing your sheets and remembering to stock up on your favorite snack every time you come home. Love is someone sending you ridiculous lolcat photos and random cartoons because he thought you'd be entertained. Love is someone you haven't seen in ages sending you a letter or a postcard. Love is someone reminding you to stop taking yourself so seriously and learn how to crack a smile every so often. Love is someone who means it when they urge you to take care of yourself on the days when you don't think you're really worth caring about. Love is someone teaching you something new that they thought you'd enjoy. Love is someone trusting you enough to share a secret. Love is someone sharing something they've created so beautiful that you forget to breathe for a few moments. Love is seeing someone you admire stand up for what she believes is right and inspire you to take action, too.

I may be single, but I do feel loved this Valentine's Day. Thank you for being there.

My mother and I are passing outside a stationery store and take a moment to peek in at the merchandise.

I am chuckling over a proto-Lolcats featuring a kitten wearing a funny mask.

My mother is laughing, too. "Porn for women! That's just brilliant!"

I turn to stare at her. "What are you talking about?"

She points at the calendar next to the cat one. It features a shirtless man vacuuming the carpet.

Such are the differences between how an asexual views the world and how most others do. But at least I have an idea of what else I should get Mom for Christmas!

It looks increasingly probable that I'll be staying an extra year here to get my master's in gerontology, or the study of human aging. It also means that I have to get my recs and whatnot for grad school ready by fall of next year, but on the bright side, I don't have to take GREs, and I think my chances for getting into the program are pretty decent. Mostly it's that USC's really making an effort to retain undergrads for their grad programs...unless it's the clinical science psych program, in which case all bets are generally off because it's one of the most research-intensive out there. Go figure.

What happened to clinical psychology? The average PhD acceptance rate is lower than that of med school at 6%, and I don't think I have the mettle to last 7-8 years in a research-oriented program. After doing research just as an undergrad, I've realized that I'm really not cut out for it; my mentor/professor was so right when she warned me that (quantitative) research sucks out your soul. Seriously, I wasn't sure if I had a soul until research this semester nearly drained it from me. My chances of getting into a doctorate program are much better if I specialize in working with traditionally underserved and rapidly expanding population, and if doctorate programs don't end up working out, at least I have a good vocational safety net in an area that honestly interests me. My preoccupation with caregiving issues and the fact that I have a much easier time connecting with older adults than with kids seems like a decent preliminary indicator that the subject matter's a good match. At the very least, all of us grow older, so you might as well learn while you're young about the issues that you'll be facing.

My mother's response to hearing about all of this was "We'll support you, but is your heart really in it?" That's the first time I've been criticized for giving primarily practical reasons for a decisions! I laughed inwardly when she said that - my mother, the would-be writer who wound up in finance, is much more the closet romantic than I am. People, even my mother, tend to see me as either having a brain or a heart, but not both in equal measure. I attempt to research my future in nauseating detail so that I can plan accordingly; dreams are great, but you can't expect that desire alone will get you where you want to be. I can't exactly tell her that one of the main motivating factors is that I want to know how to take care of her and dad better in the future when she herself is anxious enough about the prospect of aging. I don't know how to explain to her that pragmatics can coincide with passion, that I understand that compromise is necessary if you're going to achieve anything sustainable and worthwhile.

On a somewhat related note, Dad has his "one year later" follow-up with his neurologist to check up on the progression of his Machado-Joseph disease in a couple of hours. Around this time last year, he showed "significant clinical improvement" a month after a month of stem cell treatment in China. As for the long term gains, who knows. I'm personally skeptical that it'll do any good in the long run. Due to the fact that Dad received spinal cord injections of umbilical cord stem cells and not embryonic ones, he basically received a sophisticated form of blood doping where most of the stem cells turned into extra red blood cells, which temporarily make one feel more energized. I can't quite remember where I obtained this information, but from what I've heard, umbilical cord stem cells aren't as good at passing through the blood-brain barrier.

In some ways, I'm one of the worst people to be "educating" people about stem cell therapy from personal experience. I've written a brief account about it here, but I seriously doubt that anyone on campus really read it. The reporters still call home sometimes; inevitably, we know what articles will be written by the Western press. Honestly, it pisses me off that they write about we patients like we're a bunch of desperate patsies looking for any cure that has some sham of promise. There was this one Salon article that makes me cringe for its condescending tone. People don't pay $20,000 to be human guinea pigs solely because they're naïvely deluded about the possibility for being cured. The prevailing social stigma and discrimination against people with disability makes their lives so unbelievably difficult on them and their caregivers that they are willing to try anything because they have nothing to lose.

When you've grown up with a parent with a chronic medical condition, you know better than to even think of cures. I don't expect to see a cure for my dad's condition in my lifetime; to be honest, from a utilitarian viewpoint, funding's better allocated to other medical conditions such as cancer and stroke that affect a greater proportion of the population. I just want to live in a world where people with disabilities can actually find jobs in accessible workplaces and be able to use public transportation without fearing that the bus drivers won't stop for them because loading them on will delay everyone's schedule. In some ways, that's why I have difficulty understanding all of these "Walk to Cure Muscular Dystrophy" races. I don't doubt that new vaccinations and screening measures will benefit everyone in the long run. But why must we spend so much time and money on developing medical treatments that will inevitably only work for some of the population and yet neglect relatively simple accommodation measures for people with current impairments? The medical conceptualization of disability posits disabling conditions as needing to be cured, rather than to be accommodated and a focus of lifestyle adaptation in cases where the underlying medical conditions currently lack a cure. A social model of disability advocates an environment that's universally accessible and recognizes the influence of social attitudes about the capabilities of those with physical and cognitive impairments play in the roles we have available for people in the disability community. And being tired makes me ridiculously wordy.

Anyway, getting back to my original point - as important as it is to foster dialogue about the ethics of stem cell therapy and regenerative medicine, we risk overlooking the underlying issues of disability awareness and rights. The dangers of focusing so much on finding cures for severe medical conditions is that we ignore the necessity of providing accommodation for those with disability and creating more enabling environments so that everyone, not just the able-bodied, can truly celebrate “culture of life.” Using stem cells to cure chronic diseases underscores the prevalence of the medical model of disability and the social prerogative in eradicating the conditions that cause disability. Patients are driven to seek expensive, potentially risky experimental treatments abroad because they find that their quality of life has significantly deteriorated due to the lack of resources for people with disabilities and their caregivers. If legislators are hesitant about funding embryonic stem cell research, they could invest public resources instead into extending access to people with disabilities instead of forcing scientists to pursue embryonic stem cell research elsewhere. The ideal goal of stem cell therapy is to improve the quality of life for those with medically related impairments, but there are multiple avenues of pursuit in achieving this objective. As important as it is to acknowledge and protect the rights of humans coming into being, it is all too easy to overlook the eroding civil rights for people with disabilities and the sociopolitical conditions that have made stem cell therapy such a pressing issue in the first place.

OK, I confess: this is my belated Blogging Against Disablism Day post. And there's a lot more I have to say about the subject, except that I really need to finish my take home final for my disabilities and healthcare class, so I'll get around to that later.

The good thing about having so many family birthdays take place within the same two week period is that you remember to look for gifts all at once; unfortunately, I've been absent from LJ lately after a week in New York and three days in San Francisco and have a lot of catching up to do. Depending on what calendar you look at, my parents have the same birthday - the same as wiccagirl24, actually. Many happy belated returns to you, Sarah - I am so sorry that my gift is late in coming, but I swear I'll be ready with it soon.

And before I forget - happy birthday, eyepiece_simile! Hopefully you've had a chance to open your card by now :)

My cousin Venus (the only artistic member of my family since the Tang dynasty; sadly, I don't think I'm joking) is getting married this weekend, so I'll be gone until Wednesday. And somehow, magically, I am going to start and finish my LA Chinatown and Westminister presentation...soon. laleia, do you know if we need to have our presentations done by the SWA retreat? If we do, then it looks like I'll be bringing my laptop on vacation with me.

So, to pretty much sum up this month - I've been gone, I'm going away again for family-related reasons and am playing catch up on pretty much everything. I didn't even realize that there's supposedly some sort of mass exodus from Livejournal going on at the moment as laleia has recently informed me? I just thought people were busy or on vacation. Be seeing you!

It is an unspoken law of immigrants that the suitcase stuffed with all of the gifts for the relatives "back home" is the heaviest one.

That suitcase must also weigh at least 1/3 as much as the strongest person in the house, and at the very least, 1/3 of the suitcase weight is dedicated to food. I still remember when I dragged up 30 pounds of roasted peanuts for my grandmother when I was 11, but customs is a bit stricter nowadays.

My mother and I baked lemon bars together for the first time since I was seven. Or possibly the last time was when I was ten. This temporal distance seemed much more significant to me several hours ago, but I'd like to take today's baking as a good sign for the future.

Needless to say, it's amazing how much of your own handiwork you end up eating in the process despite trying to save the remains for other people. Was it Agatha Christie who said that good intentions pave the path to hell?

On a different note, I'm fairly certain about where I'll be headed to college (USC) and will probably be sending off my enrollment info tomorrow afternoon if not Tuesday. Kerstin, try not to look like you're attending my funeral.

My father has way too much fun describing his roach killing exploits. Though it's not as scary as knowing that he, a geeky class valdectorian, had at least six times as many dates as I did by the time he was my age.

The finance presentation today possibly squished my brain like a rotten watermelon being run over on my street. Seriously, all of the vague considerations I had for business school pretty much crawled into a hole and died; my fellow IHLers are smart, but most of us (I presume) don't really know anything about private equity and investment banking. I would've been even more lost if my mother didn't randomly give me economics lectures during dinner. Tonight we calculated that while you'd make $10/hr at the internship they're offering, the cost of transportation and lunch alone would eat up any profit.

In other words, it looks like I better look for a summer job elsewhere. I'm seriously considering trying to find some kind of tutoring work but I don't know how many places would hire a mere high school grad. I've heard that SCORE is decent.

Canadians: it's hard not to love them.

Really hard. Pretty much impossible, actually.

Did I mention that my cousin Venus is terrific? (Yes, that is her real name.)

Except that if I didn't know her, I'd be really tempted to mock her for being a really uber new age West Coast urbanite with her new organic food and yoga obsessions. Her long-term boyfriend, Vince, is a pretty cool guy, too.

I'll probably discover that I have even more cool cousins next year; I discover the existence of roughly three new ones a year. Last time I checked the total was somewhere around 25?

If anyone you know happens to keel dead sometime within the rest of this week, I'm really sorry. I think I'm carrying a strain of impending disaster upon way too many people I know, so perhaps I should just stick myself in quarantine.

RIP, Bakey Tsuan. He's the last of my maternal grandfather's living male friends. I'm sorry that I never got to know him better because he's the closest I ever had to a grandfather.

And I can't go to the funeral because it's the same day as the SAT. Damn you, apocalypse.