Happy New Year (Again) !!

Today is Chinese New Year. Or at least, in China today is Chinese New Year. In the US we have to wait until tomorrow to play with our firecrackers and annoy our neighbors.

Oh, how I wish I was there....this year, I have to settle for Chinatown.

But we're hoping that the year of the dog turns out to be a little more auspicious for us than the year of the chicken was - and I'm a chicken! what's up with that?! The car broke down last week, to the tune of $2200, which is almost as much as the whole thing is worth all by itself. We didn't have any choice but to fix it; with John working two jobs it was almost impossible to survive without the car. He was getting up at 1 a.m. to catch a bus to Costco and coming home from his second job at the Times around 5 p.m. I literally haven't seen him for a week and a half.

But with the help of some family and a little finagling with some payday loan places, we were able to scrape together the money we needed to get the darned thing fixed, so we've traded the stress of exhaustion for the stress of no money. Actually, it's not as bad as it sounds. When you're a student, you're used to both kinds of stress, and we've found that the no-money kind of stress is decidedly the more tolerable of the two. The thing I find especially ironic in a grim sort of way is the fact that I sold my piano last week - two days before the car broke - to get some money to put toward the impending move halfway across the world. Instead I got to spend it on rent and a new head gasket.

And I miss my piano. It may be the closest I'll ever get to having a child. And since it's been gone, I've had to get my stress out by banging on John instead.

Is This Blog Starting to Get Repetitive?

Nothing new to report. Stop reading now. I'm very serious. I'm just going to bore you, because once again I've started school. Once again I don't know how I'm going to manage to pull through. Once again I'm going to do it, much as it exhausts me, I'm going to write some random self-important blog entries about the plight of the female college student and aspiring professor in modern-day America, maybe mixed in with a few playful anecdotes about multi-cultural interactions, and then you are going to fall asleep. Because, really, you've heard it all before.

Do I sound tired? Overwhelmed? Disillusioned? If I don't, I'm either not a very good writer or not trying hard enough.

Really, now that the new year has come, the focus is starting to shift from getting through school to getting through graduation, which may sound like the same thing but actually isn't anywhere close. Suddenly I'm faced not only with what I'm going to do after I graduate - which is intimidating enough - but also with how I'm going to make it through the entire process. It's a process which involves graduation applications, graduation announcements, finishing a nearly impossible honors thesis, and trying to keep my grades up high enough that I still have a reasonable chance of going to graduate school. It's piling up emotionally to the point where I don't really want to do anything at all, which is bad. I'm surprised every college senior in the United States isn't on a federally mandated daily dose of prozac.

I am, however, excited about graduating and eager to see what life has in store for me next. WHICH BRINGS ME TO AN ANNOUNCEMENT: my graduation ceremony is scheduled for June 10 of this year, just to give a heads-up to anyone who might want to come. I won't be sending out official announcements until probably April, and I know that that might be too short of notice for some of you. So....there it is.