Hello, 25! I want to become a beautiful woman with lots of wisdom for life and work

I started my year of 25 busy like crazy but happy! It is 10 days after my 25th birthday, now I have time to sit down and write a blog post.

I started my year of 25 busy writing papers, preparing for my PhD qualifier, taking classes, traveling, making friends (and figuring out what kinds of friends are worth to make), moving to a new and exciting house (with 5 people of very diverse and balanced backgrounds, we are starting a life like a sitcom~), cooking and eating delicious food, establishing healthier life style, shopping around fashion stores, and of course thinking about life!

I now feel more confident about life and study after a lot of struggles last semester.

In the first class of a HCI course yesterday evening, the professor asked us what we want to be when grown up, I said: I want to become a beautiful woman with lots of wisdom for life and work!

Towards a Calm and Great Mind

I often feel the tension of competition,the evil jealousy and the anxiety from doing or not doing anything. Now I realize that my mind it too busy to calm down and let its full power out. I am recently reading some masterpieces from some great psychologists about child development and learning. I also watched some YouTube videos and read their biography. While sometimes I couldn't fully understand or quite agree with their theories, I am touched by the personality and spirit of these great minds.

Maybe someday if possible, I will still pursue the psychological area of children development and learning which is my initial interests. Of course, I am also always interested in linguistics, social media, technologies and learning, serious gaming, etc. Maybe I will stay in academia and do some great work and choose not to always run away from the so-called evil and darkness. Because evil and darkness are basically everywhere, I cann't always run away. What can save me is to be possessed by a great and warm mind, calm down and be quiet, always be warm and smile to people, and let evil and darkness run away from me, instead of running away from them.

Life Needs Beliefs and Dreams

I am watching the movie Eat, Pray, and Love now. An Italian guy is making fun of American people: "You feel guilty [about only eating but not working] because you are American. You don't know how to enjoy yourself. Americans know entertainment, but don't know pleasure. Americans, you work too hard. You get burned out. Then you come home, and spend the whole weekend in your pajamas in front of the TV. " I feel I am much much much worse in knowing what is pleasure, and always feel guilty about not working. However, my body is getting lazier and lazier and refuses to work.Actually, learning how to enjoy myself is also a kind of work to me, and I feel it's a difficult work and don't want to do. So the result is that I am doing nothing, neither play nor work, and only feel guilty about myself.

Sometimes, I feel I am too real, I am too aware of and also afraid of reality. I do everything on purpose. I try to be nice with every person around, but I hide myself, and I don't know how to enjoy myself, and I lost passion towards many things very soon. Last night, I spent Christmas Eve in my adviser's house. A friend expressed great passion about elder people by translating alive a speech on YouTube given by a French Granny. Although I cannot understand French, I was really moved, not by the French Granny, but by the friend's passion towards that speech. I am moved that there are still people really care about peace, animals, senior citizens, environment, and there are still people really believe the world could be a better place. I am not saying that I used to not believe, it's just I felt those are out of my control, so I don't dare to believe, because my belief couldn't change anything. Now I feel, actually I belief maybe could change something, at least myself. 

Life needs beliefs and dreams. Not all dreams need to come true; not all dreams need a plan to be implemented, to be realized. Some dreams, they will never come true, and you just hold them deep in you heart, and sleep with them with smiles.

My Gift Wishlist

I saw the Purdue Snuggie (a blanket with sleeves) again at PMU purdue shop. oh, so adorable! I definitely will have purple or red one for myself one day! en, some day in the near future!!!