Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Sachertorte = Success!

My parents came to South Bay to have lunch and dinner with me today. In addition to cleaning up my entire house, dad also made dinner for me. 好感動哦!!! We had dinner, watched a movie, and ate the sachertorte I spent the whole Sunday evening on. :)

Happy early birthday, mom! :)


Monday, September 17, 2007

Interesting Weekend

Before I start talking about all this weekend, I want to thank all those who gave me words of wisdom and support in the past couple weeks. I still haven't figured everything out yet, but at least I have the decision tree down. And, at this moment, I'm just waiting for more information before I know which branch to take.

After talking to a few friends about my situation, I realized I'm definitely not the first or last to face this. The thing that struck me, though, is that the recurring theme in most of the stories is that the guy is moving out of country for his family/career, and the girl is only moving for the guy... 女生外向 ... is there really truth to that? I love my family very, very much, and it'd be very hard for me to leave them. But, I digress... I agree with E that love should fair, but life itself isn't fair. Guess we just have to make the best out of it. Thanks again for all your encouragement, my friends! :)

OK, onto this weekend.... I went to the Twins concert in SF after taking him to the airport. While I am not a fan of this group, it was definitely an interesting experience. (It's been 10+ years since I last went to a Chinese pop concert.) Twins aren't exactly great performers, but, overall, I was pleasantly surprised because I didn't walk in with any expectations. (I watched one of their concerts on DVD once... And, let's just say there aren't quite a bit of room for improvements.)

I don't know any of their new songs, but I do recognize quite a few of their older song. Although... I gotta say it's interesting to see 2 people in their mid-twenties singing 明愛暗戀補習社. -_-"

There were rumors that Twins will go their separate ways, but them being such perfect complements to each other that I don't think they can continue their singing careers as solos. But, maybe singing isn't really what they're after. After all, Sa was recently named best actress in 金紫荊 and a Korean film festival. She didn't make a great impression on me as an actress, but maybe she's improved tremendously in the past year or so.

And... I spent most of Sunday making a cake for my mom. Here are the pictures of the damage I did to the kitchen... and some chocolate calligraphy. :P


Saturday, September 01, 2007

Sleepless Night...

I probably got about 2 hours of shut-eye last night. Try as I might, but I just couldn't sleep. The fact that I didn't eat dinner last night might have attributed to my insomnia, but there wasn't anything I could do if even the smell of food seemed revolting to me. No, I'm not anorexic. It's just a phase. My body has been acting very strangely lately (e.g. fever out of nowhere, feeling nauseous for no good reason, etc.) It's almost as if my body is fed up with my bad habits and is trying to tell me I better stop or else...

Many things have happened in the past couple of weeks. Family member having passed away, friends facing difficult situations, direction of my career changing, him deciding to go to Beijing for at least a year... But, these are not the things that are keeping me up. At least, I don't think they are. I thought blogging would help me clear my mind so that I could finally get some sleep before the long day of bachelorette party in SF, but I realized I wasn't really thinking about anything in particular as soon as I logged into Blogger (after dropping my laptop and damaging the floor...) But, I figured since I had damaged the hardwood floor for this, I might as well think of something to blog just so the damage isn't completely pointless.

A couple of months ago, he and I had a strange conversation about how we and the people around us had become relatively stagnant. This is not to say that things have become boring. It's just that a few years ago, when people were just finishing school, there were a lot more movements. Everything seemed possible. But, of course, just coz we said things are pretty stable, the whole world seemed to have suddenly shifted. People are moving into and out of the Bay Area again, planning drastic career changes, and so on.

He announced to some of our friends that he'd be going to Beijing for a year during dinner last night. And, to my surprise, people were quite shocked when he broke the news. Maybe it's coz he's talked about the possibility of moving to Taiwan, Beijing, Shanghai, or Hong Kong for so long that this decision just came natural for me. From the time we went to Beijing for the first time, I've known that he's going to want to move back to Asia sometime in the future. I guess what added to the surprise is that, this time, I'm not going to move to Beijing with him.

Truth be told, who wants to have a long-distance relationship? Let alone a long-distance marriage. But, it is what it is. This is a great opportunity for him, so I definitely don't want him to pass it up just for me, especially when I understand how important his career is to him. Besides, I'll try to figure something out. I know I've talked about leaving the firm for the longest time now, but with the new group and salary, I really want to give it another try. What complicates things a little more is that I can't really make my decision until I learn more about my new group - whenever I get a new career counselor... And, learning from last time's experience, I'm not moving out of the Bay Area without a job again. Yes, I can find a job when I get there, but being friendless, familyless, and jobless in a foreign country will drive me nuts! (Had I not found the internship last time, I would have bailed out of Beijing early.) Since I don't intend to stay in Beijing forever, an internal project within the firm would be my first choice.

From the way things are looking right now, end of December is probably the earliest that I can leave. And, it's a lot more likely for me to land on a job in Shanghai, which brings in a whole slew of different complications... Oh well, I've known from the time when I rejected the BoA job (5 offers from 1000+ applicants) that I'm not the career girl that I thought I would grow up to be. Anyway, whatever the final outcome is, life goes on.