We Real Cool.

Just another Monday night in Matthews 209 ...

Literally everybody at this school plays chess. I LOVE IT.

... And Sea Monsters

Who's actually doing work? Angela's actually doing work! Though, of course, indulging in a Jane Austen novel can hardly be considered work.

English 157: The Classic Phase of the Novel, taught by Phil Fisher. I'm loving it already!

Other novels I will be reading for this semester-long class: Buddenbrooks, The Brothers Karamazov, Madame Bovary, Middlemarch, and Anna Karenina. Somebody informed me that this does in fact add up to over FOUR THOUSAND PAGES. Thank goodness the rest of my workload is mostly problem sets (whoo!).

Arrivals

I was just kidding about that last post. You know I wouldn't return from a three-week absence only to tell you about the weather! (Well ... given my lack of reliability lately, this actually isn't so far-fetched.) Anyway, it's going to be terribly hard trying to summarize what's been one of the most amazing experiences of my life, so I'll be brief. Harvard has been, in five points or less:

• A lot of sweeping the first week. My pre-orientation program was called Fall Clean-Up, i.e. paying naive freshmen to do janitorial work under the guise of "making friends" and "learning more about the campus". Genius!
• Many, many, many amazing people. (Of course!)
• A week of delicious restaurant food (we had to pay for our own meals during FCU), followed by the start of four years of completely average dining hall food.
• Heat. Heat. Heat. If you've followed my Twitter in the past, you may just have unsubscribed yourself last week because the only thing I talked about was the heat. Waking up today without sweat pooled on my body was a positive luxury.
• Classes? What?

I wish I were cool enough to do a photojournal, but the reality is that I pretty much never remember to bring out my camera and as such have the most haphazard collection of photos ever. Here's a sampling, beginning with an original Gutenberg Bible ...

This is one of the first 23 books ever printed!

And followed by a shot of some really great people in Science Center B, which, as we discovered two weeks later, is where I'll be suffering through Life Sciences 1a for the rest of the semester.

... like we premeds won't be spending enough time in the Science Center as it is.

Other things I've learned so far? Indian guys are really awesome no matter where you go,

From left to right: Rohit, Vish, and Sidd!

dining hall food will be dining hall food, even if the building you eat in looks like Hogwarts,

This is Linxi, one of my suitemates!

clothing makes for a really good makeshift privacy curtain,

Actually, I just ran out of room for my clothes. And yes, I do sleep in there.

even concrete walls are bearable if you plaster a bunch of couture all over them,

Mood lighting! Eyy!

dinners on Sunday are by far the best meal of the week,

SUNDAE SUNDAY!

it is possible to be totally happy even when it's 99 degrees and you're melting out of your skin,

This is Kemie, another of my suitemates!

people at Harvard know how to keep talking for a really long time when it's 99 degrees out and you're melting out of your skin,

Freshman Convocation. Only at Harvard.

and ... er ... I'm sorry what POLAR BEAR HAT!

I bought this today. I am very ready for winter.

Some of you may be wondering what Koala's been up to amidst all this. But that, that ... is for the next entry. Until next time!

Lazy Afternoon

It's a beautiful day in Cambridge!

They should make movies about this place. Oh, wait ...

A Valediction Forbidding Overpacking

I've lived for nearly twelve years in a fairly affluent community, with lush green drives and beautifully manicured lawns. Never in all my time living in Walnut Creek have I ever come across a sight like this, which greeted me as I drove out of my neighborhood this morning:

Can I get a collective WTF?

Turns out, some rowdy teenagers were driving at insane speeds late at night, hit a curb, and smashed straight into the grand old sign that has proudly announced the entrance my subdivision for so long. I'd like to see it as a sign (hah!) that it's time for me to go.

And time for me to go it is. My possessions have all been miraculously packed into five boxes, I've said goodbye to all my loved ones, and my driver's license has been surrendered—yes, you heard right.

Koala was sad to see a fellow denizen of my ridiculously messy bag go.

Since I will not be driving for the majority of the next four years, and since my super-high insurance cannot be cancelled unless I simply do not have a valid license, my mom thought it prudent that I give up my license so that she won't have to pay insane amounts of money to atone for my multiple crashes and traffic violation tickets. I got a temporary photo ID from the DMV today, which I will not post here because it is so terrifyingly unattractive. Ew.

But anyway, yes! My flight leaves at 2pm tomorrow—or today, really, given the time. It's been a surreal last day in Alpharetta; I've told so many people that I'm leaving, and yet it hasn't really sunk in. At all. I'm not the type to get emotional before the fact, I suppose? But rest assured that a month from now I'll be sobbing into my pillow from missing all the wonderful people I've left behind.

Goodbye, Alpharetta. You've been good to me, for the most part. I'll miss you more than I know.

Super-Late Post!

One last scenic photo. I'm going to miss such beautiful water!

I've been home from Hawaii for a few days now, which means I've had a little while to reflect on the time I spent in the southernmost state of the union. (Trivia is great!) Hawaii is absolutely amazing—but everyone knows that, so I won't attempt to trigger your jealous impulses by rhapsodizing on its sheer awesomeness here. Instead I'll provide a different list, one with a few reasons why I'm glad I'll be spending the next four years in New England!

Reasons why Hawaii is not so awesome:

Everyone is beautiful. While eye candy is great, it has the tendency to make everyone else feel inferior. Not only was I constantly hating on myself for not being adequately tanned and toned, but I also had to listen to my mom sololiquize how everyone there was skinnier than her. Which is, for the record, UNTRUE. She's tinier than Koala. 

Sporadic raining. The tropical weather makes for some beautifully lush plant life, but it's also a royal pain when you walk everywhere. Because even though the climate is absolutely wonderful, for some reason the rain feels like little needles of coldness piercing through your pores and dropping the temperature ten degrees within the space of a minute. It happens randomly throughout the day, and you never know whether you're going to get a light drizzle or torrential downpour ... and dammit, the rain makes my hair look bad!

Humidity. Ack.

Sun, sun, sun. Have I mentioned before that I hate sunscreen? By the last day in Hawaii, I was ready to give up a day at the beach just so that I wouldn't have to wear sunscreen. I KNOW. I am an ungrateful, sunscreen-fearing child.

Too many Asians! I liked this at first, then realized that I kinda liked being a minority. Granted, I think Harvard's Asians compose some 30% of the total student popoulation by now ... but still. The one good thing about this was that there were so many Japanese people that the bookstores' manga sections are gigantic beyond belief. WHOO MANGA!

Everything is expensive. Well, it is a giant tourist trap ...

I'm keeping this list short, because rumor has it that my mom will be moving to Hawaii permanently in half a year or so—which means that on school breaks, I get to come home ... to Honolulu. And despite the humidity and sunscreen and overabundance of Asians, I'm pretty sure that's actually the greatest thing ever.

I move up to Cambridge in less than two days! Packing has been surprisingly painless; it's saying goodbye that's hardest. Still, I'm not sure there are enough words to describe how excited I am—I can't believe I'm actually going to study* at Harvard University. 

*Well, only a little. I'll surprise myself if I study more in college than I did in high school. :)

Wicky-Wicky Wacky Waikiki

(The title to this post is actually taken from the lyrics to the song "Pineapple Princess" by Annette Funicello. It's so adorable!)

Koala has been upset with me lately, as I've been spending too much time with another inanimate object - namely, my mosquito bite medicine. I'm sorry, my dear. You know I'm just using him for his cruelty-free itching relief; I love none other but you!

Er. Moving on ...

Yesterday was a grueling day, lemme tell you. The itinerary went something like this:

10:00am: Suntanning on a beach in Waikiki.
12:30pm: A lunch of French desserts and delicious Japanese grilled steak.
2:00pm: Napping in the shade of a tree next to the ocean.
6:00pm: Eating delicious food while watching hula girls and half-naked guys in skirts dance with fire.

So, as you can see ... exhausting!

My mom and Doug call this place the "office," presumably because this is where he used to go to get work done. I am so jealous.

Caught during a moment of peace between waves! A minute later, a giant wave completely soaked the ground where I stood to take this picture.

PIG ROAST! WHOO!

But all things good must come to an end, as today I was dragged along to go hiking. I am all for braving the outdoors and squishing through ankle-deep mud and suffering mosquito bites, but -- oh, wait. I'm not. So we can all guess how well this venture went!

The mud covered up where I'd gotten my favorite band to autograph my Converse ... :'(

As a budding photographer (hah!), I figured it was a good time to maybe take a bunch of photos as part of a series. I call these next four pictures "Doug the Explorer" ... creative, right?

 

But Doug the Explorer would be nothing without his faithful partner, Boots the Monkey -- I mean my mom.

I actually looked up Dora the Explorer on Wikipedia so I could find the name of her companion. If that isn't dedication to blogging, I don't know what is.

We're going to the market at Hale'iwa tomorrow -- that's right, shopping! Cue giddy and excited Angela bouncing off the walls after a day spent sloshing around in muddy Converse. Although, given the voracious appetite I've developed on this trip, I'll probably spend all of my money on food before I even get to the real merchandise ...

On Not Finding Nemo

Everyone has their quirks, right? One of mine, unreasonable though it may be, is an inability to apply sunscreen by hand. (I hate the way it feels!) So, my mom and I left bright and early this morning for the drugstore in order to obtain some beautiful, beautiful continuous spray sunscreen. I discovered two things during this morning jaunt:

First, that there apparently exists a belief system by the name of anthroposophy.

Anthroposophy, according to Wikipedia, "postulates the existence of an objective, intellectually comprehensible spiritual  world accessible to direct experience through inner development—more specifically through cultivating conscientiously a form of thinking independent of sensory experience." So basically they're all on drugs.

And second, that the mass transit here is actually officially named The Bus. Doug tells us that it was in fact one called De Bus, because that's how the majority of the population pronounces it. I've not yet searched for evidence supporting or debunking this claim, although I honestly wouldn't be surprised if it were true.

The taxis are also all called "The Cab." No, seriously.

Our trip of the day was to Hanauma Bay, which is by far the most beautiful place I've ever been in my life. It's home to a sprawling coral reef teeming with pretty underwater life, some of which I had the chance to meet during my first ever foray into snorkeling! It wasn't that bad after I figured out how to stop inhaling seawater with every breath, and I made a friend -- his name is Ted, and he is a gray fish with dark gray stripes. No matter where I swam, I also seemed to keep running into him ... although this may be because I was swimming in circles. Who knows.

Even my crappy photography skills cannot mask the utterly breathtaking beauty of this bay.

So much blue!

My mom also insisted on taking photos of me, despite my protests. I'm sharing one that conveniently does not show my face, just to emphasize how ridiculously pale I am -- even after a day in the sun.

How to tell she's not a Hawaiian native ...

 And here is one of my beautiful mother!

Only my mom can make mismatching look so damn good.

Afterward, we drove to Waikiki in a failed attempt to find the entrance to some state park or another. We ended up on the Madison Avenue of Oahu, and it was only after being flooded by a sea of tourists that I realized how few white people there are in Hawaii. Where I'm living, they've all got dark hair, warm skin tones, and squinty eyes. I feel so welcome!

Tomorrow is another beach day, and we get to go to a luau! I'm pretty sure it's sponsored by the military and my mom told the guy that we had a brother-in-law in the Marine Corps in order to get us in ... I wish I were kidding. But either way, I'm excited. A real luau yay!

Aloha, Honolulu!

I'm in Hawaii for the week! When I left for the airport Monday morning, I was under the impression that it would take maybe five hours on a plane to get here. I was mistaken, of course. Apparently it requires ten hours of flight time to get to the Aloha State, complete with $3 chips and overly curious toddlers. Nevertheless, Koala and I found our entertainment in rereading one of the greatest plays ever ...

I went through a phase this year when pretty much the only literary references I ever made were to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, to the point where my friend asked me if I'd ever read any other work in my life. And yes, sadly, making literary references is an integral part of most conversations with me.

Anyway! My mom and her fiance picked me up at the airport, and as we were driving back to his place, I counted no fewer than six rainbows. I don't even remember the last time I saw a rainbow in Alpharetta, much less a double-ended rainbow like this one:

My mom also presented me with a freshly fallen plumeria (the flower of love!), which Hawaiian girls wear behind their ears. The custom is to place it on the left if you're married and the right if you're single.

(Forget Facebook relationship statuses. This is how it's done.)

This next picture is the view from the apartment, taken during a light rain. I didn't realize it would rain so much, but I haven't been properly dry since I got here. But it doesn't matter, because it's so pretty and warm ...

And today we visited the Dole Plantation, which was home to the world's largest maze! It was here that I discovered my sense of direction really is as bad as my mom makes it out to be, because even with a map of the gigantic maze I still managed to get hopelessly lost every few minutes. I always thought the most intimidating part of the Triwizard Tournament was trying to get to the center of dark maze ... not fighting dragons, or saving hostages from hostile mermen, or battling giant spiders. Just maze navigation. There was also a pineapple garden, which showcased pineapples plants from around the world. Little ones, big ones, dark green ones, and RED ONES!

(While we were visiting, I vaguely remembered something from U.S. History about Dole taking over Hawaii from its queen. Turns out that Sanford B. Dole led the provisional government of Hawaii, which was set up after Queen Liluokalani and the Kingdom of Hawaii were overthrown — but it was his cousin, James Dole, who became the pineapple magnate and founded Dole Plantation. So the only thing I remember from Ms. Waldman's class, I was actually completely wrong about. Unsurprising.)

While we were driving home, our car inexplicably broke down on the side of the highway (Likelike Highway, pronounced lee-kay-lee-kay, or maybe it was Kamehameha?) ... so, with our source of transportation gone, we settled back down at the apartment for a siesta. Afterward, my mom somehow managed to convince me to walk two miles to go see a Chinese cemetery. I complained a lot (as always!), but it was well worth the walk — I got to see so many beautiful Hawaiian houses on the way, all of which inspired me to buy a home on this beautiful island someday with my husband and three children. We'll have plumerias out front, huge windows, and Japanese grass. Yeah, I have it all planned out.

Plus, the cemetery was curiously built on the best piece of real estate ever. I didn't get to take a picture because the lighting at sundown was terrible, but it was in the center of a valley looking towards the sea, slightly raised up above all the neighboring houses on either side. Doug, my mom's fiance, observed that the dead people of Manoa (the town we were in) are so much better off than the living. It's true! Apparently, the founder of the cemetery was an astronomer-geologist who, after extensive calculations, decided that the spot was "the pulse of the watchful dragon of the valley." And it seems that only the dead are allowed an extended stay in the dragon's pulse with such a gorgeous view.

I'm usually creeped out by cemeteries, but this one looked peaceful and pretty enough to explore. One headstone stood out to me in particular, mostly because of the father's name ...

... and I'm not entirely sure what this sculpture is supposed to be, but it looks like a person in great distress!

The cemetery was also home to a really fantastic tree. Or two trees. Or many trees? Either way, don't worry. I've got the job of making a path through the branches covered:

And that's all for now! Hopefully tomorrow the car will be fixed and the weather slightly less rainy so that we can do what I've really been looking forward to — take a trip to the beach! It's imperative that I get a tan before summer ends, after all, and I only have about two weeks left before shipping up north ...

Prologue

When I was five years old, my mother and I found a peculiar creature inside one of my Happy Meals. We peered at it for awhile in great curiosity, debating its genus and species, until finally my mom arrived at a conclusion: "It's a polar bear!"

... it was not a polar bear. It was, in fact, an adorable little Teenie Beanie Baby koala.

He went by the name of Mel, according to the name tag. Five-year-old me was horrified at the moniker, clearly under the impression that no self-respecting marsupial would ever adopt such a strange-sounding name. So I chose a different name for him instead — Koala. 

And Koala he stayed, for years and years. I carried him around with me almost everywhere I went throughout my elementary school career, and my friends and I would narrate his travels along the way. Any new friend I met was immediately introduced to Koala, and soon he would find his own companions by way of other stuffed animals, whether their filling be plastic beans or synthetic fibers. He had a little home, a sleeping bag, a hand-sewn lab coat, even his own Duel Monsters deck. And I still remember giving him baths, rubbing him gently down with my favorite shampoo and body wash in order to make him as clean and nice-smelling as possible. 

(Once, my friend tried to get Koala extra clean and scrubbed him with a toothbrush. To this day, I have not forgiven her for this transgression.)

So he had a good life, but it wasn't meant to last forever. Because Koala was a tiny little thing, he tended to get lost in the weirdest places — inside my pillowcase, buried deep within the couch, on top of the highest and dustiest cabinets in my house. During those periods when he was gone and I'd not yet found his latest hiding spot, my friends and I started writing them off as Koala's vacations (he was particularly partial to the Bahamas). But by the end of the fifth grade, one of Koala's brief respites to the Bahamas had stretched into perhaps a permanent holiday. I tore through my home looking for him, but after weeks of searching finally gave up. And so it appeared that he would stay in the Bahamas forever, away from the love and adoration of a ten-year-old girl. I was upset that my dear companion had gone missing, to be sure. But then I started feeling that just maybe it was high time to let him go. So I did; I forgot about him, and went about with the trials and tribulations of my preteen years.

The story would have ended there, if I hadn't become hopelessly addicted to eBay sometime during my junior year. I bought all sorts of weird things, most of which are still scattered haphazardly around my room. A set of hematite stones. Some crappy earrings. An old pincushion, shaped like a stiletto heel. A pink violin. It was only a matter of time before I thought to maybe search for Teenie Beanie Babies, and lo and behold, baby Mels were calling from every corner of the online auction site. I bought one, of course, and he arrived at my home a few days later.

This new Koala isn't exactly like the old one. His face is sort of squashed, his body's a little too fat, and he's not nearly as dirty as my companion of yesteryear once was. But I'm working on it. He comes with me whenever I have space in my purse, and even though his own dueling deck has long since been relegated to storage space, he seems to be getting along just fine.

I'm heading up to Harvard as a freshman in three weeks, and Koala's coming with me. I know nothing about what my life will be like, except that it'll be vastly different from the one I'm living now. But I won't be alone. My tiny little koala will keep me company, and this blog — which will be less Koala-centered than this first entry might suggest, I promise — will hopefully help me share all the fun and misery I experience along the way.

So ... welcome! Follow me if you'd like (I'd love it if you did), and so long until my next post!