Oh, oh, oh, You're changing your heart......

One Two Three Four
Tell me that you love me more
Sleepless, long nights
That was what my youth was for

Oh teenage hopes are lying at your door
Left you with nothing
But they want some more

Oh, oh, oh
You're changing your heart
Oh, oh, oh
You know who you are

Sweetheart, bitter heart
Now I can't tell you apart
Cozy and cold
Put the horse before the cart

Those teenage hopes
Who have tears in their eyes
Too scared to own up
To one little lie

Oh, oh, oh
You're changing your heart
Oh, oh, oh
You know who you are

One, two, three, four, five, six, nine, and ten
Money can't buy you back the love that you had then
One, two, three, four, five, six, nine, and ten
Money can't buy you back the love that you had then

Oh, oh, oh
You're changing your heart
Oh, oh, oh
You know who you are
Oh, oh, oh
You're changing your heart
Oh, oh, oh
You know who you are

Old Fashion

People say although I say the most outrageous things, I am actually very old fashion on the inside. You think I don't know that?!

I wear black and gray color most of the time, and it has to cover at least 85% of my body. The only hobby I have is reading. I have no social life. I can't dance because I am extremely self conscious and don't know where to put my arms. Yet I don't think you have any idea just how old fashion I actually am especially when it comes to love and love songs. I probably have said this before. When it comes to friendship, older the better. To me, so are the love songs.

This song is older than me, with very simple words. It goes something like this, '...This green island is rocking gently in the moonlight like a boat. You, my love, is flowing in my heart like that too.... ' (Excuse my poor translation, but you got the idea :P)

Isn't this how love should be?! soft and gentle, yet strong. It keeps you warm, calms you down, yet gives you strength to face life and not be afraid of whatever the future might bring. It should really be more like water, not as delicious and exciting as wine, but keeps you alive. It took me years and hard learnt lessons to get it ...

Harry Potter in Point Form (Plot Spoiler)

'The dedication of this book is split seven ways: To ... And To YOU, If you have stuck with Harry until the very end...'



After a week of extremely lack of sleep, I finished the book 7. I happened to be on call and working 12 hours a day the same time. The whole week I felt like walking under water, which was fine with me anyway since every time I read HP, the muggle world just seems such a hopeless bore.

• Before the book came out, several people had tried to tell me the ending of the book, which they probably googled up somewhere. Interestingly none of these people ever read HP books. Actually I would be surprised if any of them read any book in a while (I am not talking about technical/self-help books or the Bible). The mentality behind this behavior, the satisfaction for ruining the story for others, is beyond my understanding. I suspect it might be similar to the playground bully's.

• Like I said before that people who claim the reason they don't read HP is because it is children's book are the people who probably don't read shit anyway. Even funnier, one of them declares HP story is stupid after watching one and half of the HP movies. Please see Sienfield's episode of George and his book club (the one with Breakfast at Tiffany) for my comments on this wise guy (Actually this guy's mind is so amazing that I would have to start a new post just for him).
  

• After finishing the last book, I realized JKR probably had most of the plot and fate of most characters planned at the very beginning, which is quite impressive. There were so many times I laughed out loud while reading. There were many times I was 'wow-ed' by her imagination. If anyone deserves to be rich, she does for making so many people especially children so very happy.
  

• Hermione is my type of girl. A little Miss bossy know-it-all , extremely bright, loyal, and compassionate. She is the best friend anyone could ever ask for. I believe it was the right idea that she ended up with Ron. She and Harry both need a partner who is a little bit 'weaker'. If I could have a daughter like her someday, my life would just be complete :P
  

• Snape is the Hamlet of the story, so he had to die. There is no other ending for the tragic hero. One theory of the reason why he said to Harry at the last moment 'Look at me...look at me...' was Harry had the exact eyes of his mother's. I know this is a bit cheesy, but it is also heartbreakingly beautiful, something I'd rather believe for once.
  

• I have to confess that I was more shocked than sad when Dumbodor and Black died. But when Dobby and Fred died it really broke my heart. Even the magic world would be less exciting with out the twins, and Dobby, oh dear Dobby, the courageous, faithful, and free elf...

The last 10 years has been bitter sweet. When it was finally over, it felt like losing a family member. HP is a smart, warm and funny story. Maybe it is for children, but it is also for everyone who was once a child. It is bitterly surprising to see how we have lost our imagination along the way to become this boring thing called 'adult'. If I ever saw a rabbit wearing a hat and checking his pocket watch, I would go down that hole with it every single time.

Random Thought

One of my coworker's daughter is turning 18 today. 18 years old, how long ago was that? Do I wish I could turn back time and be 18 again? Oh God no! I don't ever want to be that silly, naive, and unwise ever again. I am not a sentimental person. I throw old stuff out without thinking twice. Every time I look back, I always say to myself, 'Thank God it's over'.

Everyone who has seen my baby picture from last post says, 'What has happened to you Vivi. You looked so happy there.' Hahaha :D

People who claim to be too busy to read usually don't read anyways. People who claim to never read Harry Potter usually don't ready anyways.

Recently I have heard couple of cases concerning relocation for relationship. I just have to post this one here (Washington Post column:Tell Me About It by Carolyn Hax)

Hi, Carolyn:

I'm in a loving relationship with a wonderful guy. We are both in our 20s and will both be coming up on big moves for school and work in the next couple of years. We talk of the future, and we want to be together . . . but at what point is it okay to start making plans when you don't have a ring on your finger

Washington


By "ring on your finger," you mean when you barter your free will for a trinket?

He doesn't marry you, you marry each other. I'm loath to turn this into a male-female issue, but rings on fingers go straight there without my help. In a decade of advising, here is a question no man has ever sent me: "Should I wait till we're engaged before I relocate for her?"

It is your life. It was your life before, it is your life now, it will be your life when you do or don't get married. Nobody is telling you otherwise -- except you. He's either committed to you, or he isn't. You're either committed to him, or you're not. You either trust your judgment, or you don't. Stop waiting for someone else's permission to chart the course of your life. Look around. People live like this every day. I'm guessing your boyfriend is one of them.

To Live

You probably have heard it from time to time. Couple months ago it was the pet food, now it is the toothpaste. These are the stories outside of China. I wonder if you have ever wondered how life is inside that country? According to the laws of business, when quantity goes up, price goes down. So what is the cheapest thing in China? People! Lives!

Tai Hu is the 3rd biggest lake of China. It is so beautiful that it is used to be called 'Paradise on Earth'. This is how it used to look like:








This is how it looked like last week, which left millions of people with no water:








Everytime I go back to China, I feel it is like a giant machine, old, enormous and loud with steam coming out everywhere. It keeps on going, and every step is heavy, large and ground-shaking. If you look closely you can see almost every piece of metal is rusted and every nail and joint is lose. The whole thing might fall apart or explode anytime, but surprisingly it just keeps going...

Everytime I go back to China, I feel 'man, I love this place to death!'. This is almost a heartbreaking type of love. I see how the country and its people are misunderstood by the rest of the world and are portraited as some communist monsters. I see how hardship shapes personality, how growing up without privacy leads to rudeness and inconsideration. I see how poverty nourishes ignorance. I worry about the future of the children because their government views its people's life as cheap as dirt. Forget about the glorious history and civilization, the one thing that Chinese are truly the best at is just to stay alive.

PS. I recommend the movie 'To Live' if you haven't seen it already.

Picture Show

I haven't taken too many pictures through out the years. I am not comfortable in front of a camera. Usually as soon as someone says 'smile' I turn into this 'most wanted' look. I don't even know why, might be genetic.

Beijing, China

This is me, 100 days old. This is also the only piece of evidence I have to prove that I was, at least once, cute! According to my mom this is the best picture I've ever taken :P

As you can see this picture was taken many many years ago, which says alot about who I am. I am still the same girl, playful, goofy, funny looking, slightly nuts, stubborn, with the same curiosity of a cat!

The second window from the bottom was my home for more than 10 years. It was a small two-bedroom apartment. The smaller room was mine. It was cold in the winter and hot and stuffy in the summer. Nonetheless it was my little world...

This is where I used to 'park' my bike :P

Old fashion public washroom.

Corner of the living room of our new place

Saskatoon, SK, Canada

Can you not say it is a beautiful place?!

Little side street where my apartment building was on

Black screen of death at work

Allow me to introduce Honey. Saskatoon really exceeded my expectation!

to be continued...

Birthday, Office and Stuff

This Tuesday was my 33th birthday. Lately my biological clock has been ticking loudly every night like a bomb. So I decided to lay low and let the day slip away without notice. But people!



Flowers from Barb from Saskatoon! (thanks Barb, you are the best!)













Cake and silly birthday song from my coworkers. I was told I was the first one who tried to cut a square cake in a 'pie' way!







Our manager was away for a few days, and this was what was waiting for him when he came back!!!








More balloon attack!!!
















My cubicle now :P

The Catcher in the Rye

"...Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around-nobody big, I mean-except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff-I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy..."

--- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

What You Don't Know Does Hurt

I don't know what's with me and horror movie. I crave for it once in a while. It works almost like 'reboot' and periodically gives me a good shake. Good horror movies are even more rare than good movies. This results in me watching way to many awful horror movies. The last one I watched was Reaping. This is one of those movies that makes you feel that the creator actually think that the audience, you, are idiots. Anyways it did remain me of something else, what's more dangerous than devil worshiping is ignorance.

There are complex issues in this world, so complex that few people or nobody understands, but there are also questions that seem so confusing only due to lack of basic knowledge of natural and social science. Here I am recommending 3 books. They cover the fundamental things everyone should know of natural science and history. They were all written in layman's language, easy to understand. The first two were also written with great sense of humor, a true fun read. The last one is honest, sincere and compassionate. It takes the mystery out of the biggest fear of all time - death, because of this it is actually comforting.

1. A Short History of Nearly Everything
by Bill Bryson



2. The Human Story: Our History, From the Stone Age to Today by by James C. Davis



3. How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter
by Sherwin B. Nuland

So You Think You Can Dance!

I always always thought horse was such a beautiful animal, moving ever so gracefully almost god like, but I wasn't expecting this. Just be patient. This might just be the most amazing thing you've ever seen...

The Hours

"...I remember one morning getting up at dawn, there was such a sense of possibility. You know, that feeling? And I remember thinking to myself: So, this is the beginning of happiness. This is where it starts. And of course there will always be more. It never occurred to me it wasn't the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment. Right then..."

-- Clarissa from The Hours By Michael Cunningham

Try Honesty

I had an interesting dream one night. I was on a date with Dr. Wilson, the TLC and also a bit shy doctor from House. It was very sweet and romantic, one of those dreams from which you wake up feeling happy. Freud said the general purpose of dreams is wish fulfillment like children dreaming of ice cream. Well, I am not going to over analyze it :P

How come it wasn't House in the dream? Everyone knows I am crazy about House. Maybe just maybe I like House because I see a little bit of myself in him. House believes that like political correctness, niceness is overrated nowadays. Everyone is doing great. Everyone is nice and sweet, the artificial, convenient sweetness, but how many of us really care? I often feel that when someone chooses to be nice instead of honest to you, there is slight possibility that they don't think you can't handle the truth. Have you ever tried to speak exactly what's on your mind? Feels great, doesn't it?! Some people say that I have brutal honesty. I wonder how I can still be alive! I apologize if I have hurt anyone's feelings, and it was never consciously done.

Isn't it depressing? Don't you think?!

Life has been a bit depressing lately. I am worried about my parents' health. I have a boss who is going through menopause, and whose mood is as unpredictable as the weather on the west coast. I am living in an apartment building that is older than me. The carpet is so old, that it is impossible to tell the original color. My upstairs neighbors are two well fed college boys. The only way they know how to do anything is to do it loudly. The old wood building has absolutely no such thing called sound proof. So I know for whatever reason college boys jogs in bedroom at 2am, and 5am, and they can still get up at 6:30am.

So what do I do when I am depressed? For the hundred and first time I watch Sex and City. Have you ever gotten that feeling that every time you meet a weird person or an odd thing just happened to you, it reminds you of an episode of Seinfeld? Same thing, whenever girls talk about a guy with PROBLEMS, there probably is an episode of Sex and City already just for him.

They say everyone settles at the end. It is only a matter of time.

Isn't it ironic? Don't you think?

Once upon a time my best friend and I thought we got our lives all figured out. She would be a scientist or some tech geek since she was the smartest kid on the block (not the most hard working, just the smartest). I was always a chatterbox, so I would be a business woman of some sort who would talk people into buy anything. We would marry German soccer players, a striker for me, and a center-field for her (yes, I was always the vain one). We would play 'Love is All Around' from 'Four Weddings and a Funeral' at our weddings. We would live in two houses right beside each other. We would each have 11 kids so we could have our own soccer team.

15 years later, thousands miles apart, we drag ourselves up every morning to make ends meet. We are still single and have no fancy ideas about matrimony and reproduction. She is in business administration, and I end up being a geek. One of our friend is married and one is going through divorce. One has cancer, and one plays video game every waking moment. There was a song very popular back then when we were kids, and it went something like '...It is not that I don't understand, the world is changing fast...'

Happy Valentine's Day!

Good luck with searching in the the whole wide world for matrimony :)

---------------------------------------------

An Affair Of the Head
They Say Love Is All About Brain Chemistry. Will You Be Dopamine?

By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 13, 2007; C01



It's all about dopamine, baby, this One Great True Love, this passionate thing we'd burn down the house and blow up the car and drive from Houston to Orlando just to taste on the tip of the tongue.

You crave it because your brain tells you to. Because if a wet kiss on the suprasternal notch -- while, say, your lover has you pinned against a wall in the corner of a dance club -- doesn't fire up the ventral tegmentum in the Motel 6 of your mind, well, he's not going to send you roses tomorrow.

Dopamine.

God's little neurotransmitter. Better known by its street name, romantic love.

Also, norepinephrine. Street name, infatuation.

These chemicals are natural stimulants. You fall in love, a growing amount of research shows, and these chemicals and their cousins start pole-dancing around the neurons of your brain, hopping around the limbic system, setting off craving, obsessive thoughts, focused attention, the desire to commit possibly immoral acts with your beloved while at a stoplight in the 2100 block of K Street during lunch hour, and so on.

"Love is a drug," says Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University and author of "Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love." "The ventral tegmental area is a clump of cells that make dopamine, a natural stimulant, and sends it out to many brain regions" when one is in love. "It's the same region affected when you feel the rush of cocaine."

Passion! Sex! Narcotics!

Why do we suspect this isn't going to end well?

Because these things are hard-wired not to last, all of them. Short shelf lives. The passion you fulfill is the passion you kill. The most wonderful, soaring feeling known to all mankind . . . amounts to no more than a narcotic high, a temporal state of mania.

"Being in love, having a crush on someone is wonderful . . . but our bodies can't be in that state all the time," says Pamela C. Regan, a professor of psychology at California State University, Los Angeles, and author of "Mind Games: A Primer on Love, Sex and Marriage." "Your body would fizzle out. As a species, we'd die."

Some of these love chemicals in the brain, scientists measure by the picogram, which is a trillionth of a gram.

How fragile, this thing called love.

* * *

Just about all writing about love stinks, maybe because so much of it begins with something like "O!" or maybe because people are (a) in love when they write it, which makes for a lot of senseless mooning the rest of us couldn't care less about; or (b) they have just been Kicked to the Curb of Romance, in which case they would rather be pinned to an insect board and labeled than live another minute on this godawful Planet of Hate.

Sigh.

Stendhal was onto something in the 19th century when he observed that "The pleasures of love are always in proportion to our fears," because passionate love is also partly about terror. Bill Shakespeare had it down cold, when he had Friar Laurence warn young Romeo of the perils of passion: "These violent delights have violent ends."

And did Romeo listen?

Shucks, no! Wise counsel, patience, foresight, prune juice -- who wants that ? Is there one among us who, at least once in this life, does not want to throw everything out the door and sprint to the Disco Ball of the Brain, where there are big white piles of dopamine, where a hot and sweaty Barry White is always on stage, thumping out "You're My First! My Last! My Everything!" And there's that new girl in class! Scantily clad! She's on the floor, beckoning you! Yes, Bubba, you! Out you go, and she's saying your name and her hand slips to the small of your back, and this is going to last FOREVER AND EVER!

Here it goes, a long time ago, Abelard and Heloise, two of history's most famous lovers:

Abelard to Heloise: "So intense were the fires of lust which bound me to you that I set those wretched, obscene pleasures, which we blush even to name, above God as above myself."

She to he: "Even during the celebration of the Mass, when our prayers should be purest, lewd visions of the pleasures we shared take . . . a hold on my unhappy soul."

HONEY! BABY! SWEETIE! CALL ME!

Did we mention Abelard was castrated as a result of their affair? And Heloise went off to a convent for the rest of her life? That they named their child "Astrolabe"? What people! What passion! What the hell were they thinking?

Actually they weren't, and neither are you, not really, when you fall passionately in love.

In her most recent research, Fisher and colleagues gave 32 love-struck subjects an MRI scan while they viewed a picture of their beloved.

Boy, did their brains light up!

There are two shrimp-size things on either side of your brain called the caudate nuclei. This is the gear that operates bodily movements and the body's reward system: "the mind's network for general arousal, sensations of pleasure, and the motivation to acquire rewards," Fisher writes. And when the test subjects looked at their sweeties, these things started singing "Loosen Up My Buttons" with the Pussycat Dolls!

This, then, kicked the party over to the tiny ventral tegmental area, a little peapod-size thingy that sends dopamine bopping around your head.

This is what scientists call lots of fun.

A separate study by Italian researchers several years ago showed something else.

Serotonin, another neurotransmitter in the brain associated with obsession, depression and racing thoughts, was greatly affected -- right down to the molecular level -- by romance and surging dopamine. People newly in love and people with obsessive-compulsive disorder showed the same lowered levels of the "platelet 5-HT transporter." In other words, dopamine appears to suppress serotonin, which in turn triggers obsessive-compulsive thought patterns.

You can't stop thinking about Dave. No wonder! Dave's hiding under a wet flap of cortex!

Your brain is officially in love, and it officially is driving you crazy.

Oliver Sacks, the famed neurologist and author, once cited the case of a 90-year-old woman who had suddenly become radiant, flirty, even frisky. The diagnosis: a long-delayed onset of neurosyphilis had loosed the reins on her inhibitions.

She did not want to be treated.

"What a paradox, what a cruelty, what an irony," Sacks wrote. "That inner life and imagination may lie dull and dormant unless released, awakened, by an intoxication or a disease . . . it is the very realm of Cupid and Dionysus."

* * *

Cupid can't last, you know.

Oxytocin and other chemicals kick in, running around your brain to make you bond with your lover, producing a mellower, more sustainable relationship.

Women: contented sigh. Men: light snoring.

Or, your Previously Perfect Love Pumpkin turns into possibly the most selfish, cheating, low-down dirty dog this side of Amarillo. You get dumped. This is what produces "drama."

"Drama" is not good for your "brain."

What it feels like:

A one-way ticket to the Tex-Mex Border Bar of the Mind. It's always dark in here, stinks of old cigars. The clock on the wall always reads Beer:30. Your caudate nucleus is now slouched over a bar stool in the dark. Sitting next to it is Freddy Fender.

Suddenly your brain bellows, off-key:

WASTED DAYS AND WASTED NIGHTS!

Freddy looks up from his beer.

I HAVE LEFT FOR YOU BEHIND!

Freddy throws his arm around your brain and joins in:

FOR YOU DON'T BELONG TO ME!

YOUR HEART BELONGS TO SOMEONE ELSE!

Your brain can spend entire days doing this.

This is because your brain has kicked into reverse, and love is long gone.

O!

Rejection, rage, despair!

Dopamine leaves the scene of the affair, now running off into the nucleus accumbens, the insular cortex, the lateral orbitofrontal cortex, research by Fisher and others shows. Jilted lovers' brains now light up in these areas when they look at pictures of their former flames -- this brain matter is associated with taking big risks, addiction, physical pain and obsessive-compulsive disorders. This is why, researchers theorize, people become obsessed with lost love, and are driven, in extreme cases, to stalking, suicide, homicide, rubber tubing.

Regan, the California researcher, notes that such cases are rare, and may have more to do with existing mental issues than simple unrequited love. Still, she says, passion is destined to end, whether mellowing into long-term love or blowing up on the freeway at 4 a.m. Given this, she wonders if "we do our self a disservice by glorifying passionate love so much."

"The search for eternal passion is very misguided," she says. "It's the search for the perfect high that keeps people discarding relationships right and left . You don't feel the same way you did; people want to break up, instead of seeing it as normal."

And so, alas. Even neurologists, to go with Shakespeare's priest, now tell us passion is true love's fool's gold, a flamboyant dead end on the evolutionary chain of primate happiness.

The only problem with this insight is that no one pays it any mind. Doomed passion may not make us right, and it may not even make us very happy.

It only makes us human. It only makes us who we are.