detour

      I just finished my trip in Italy and I like it so much that I can't tolerate hearing Dutch again during the boarding process for my return trip.       The good thing about being a foreigner in Italy is that actually I dare to face unknown difficulties compared to my boyfriend, especially the language barrier. We accidentally took the wrong train and came to a neighborhood where you couldn't see any tourists. And I wanted a gelato there so we were waiting in line. There were only Italian speaking in that small shop. I managed to buy the ice cream I wanted in the end and was so happy that I even took a selfie with the ice cream.       I may be so good at enduring the embarrassment when I can see that other people try to understand me because I am not speaking the local language or speaking the local language with my own accent, wrong word order, and incorrect pronunciations. In Belgium, I constantly need to figure out what other...

            I just made a decision that I would not work on the new market research project and now I am back in the library again, Just like in 2021 when I quit my job and stayed in the library trying to prepare for the English level test and learn Dutch by myself. Now I am really learning Dutch because French broke my heart :) Sometimes when you look back at the past, you just keep wondering which mysterious force pushes you to become who you are now. Me again, being proudly unemployed. That's a joke since I just cried this morning feeling all the anxieties about the uncertainty of life.      One of my dreams is to become a writer. I actually thought about the idea of applying for the creative writing program after completing a course at Berkeley called people of mixed racial descent. I loved the course so much that I had a strong desire to make my voice (and the people that can relate to my experience) heard through writing. Then I ca...

      Because of the Chinese New Year, I am progressing slowly in recruiting participants, so unexpectedly I get one week's break from this remote market research work. Sometimes I feel like I am in China since I also have one week off eating and sleeping. Yesterday I got extremely nervous because of the french exam.       To be honest, I don't like the new French teacher even though she is kind and nice. I just feel like she can not see me as a person because she can not relate to my situation as a super introverted person learning French and I failed to get more moral support from her. Sometimes, I bump into my previous french teacher in Leuven and she will say hello to me warmly. Then I would think what if she taught me for B1 class.  I could understand most of the conversations in class not through the words, but through the facial expressions and guessing from the context. I am good at observing people silently. But when I tried to express my...

    It has been a long time since my last essay. Thanks for the kind reminder from my boyfriend, now I am writing again. Sometimes I would think negatively that maybe I don't have any dreams because I am so easy to give up. Life is already very hard, so why not take a break and just be lazy? However, deep down inside, I know I still have dreams. Otherwise, I will not feel stressed and frustrated these days because I feel too tired after work to do anything. I guess people who truly care about you will not only give compliments but also push you a bit to walk out of your comfort zone. At first, it could spoil the fun of the moment but it helps me to achieve my dream later on.       I guess when we talk about serious relationships, it always comes with the problem of how to handle the relationship between the present and the future. The way of seeing the future is shaped by family backgrounds, social environment, etc. As raised in China, I realize that the ed...

  my brilliant friend      Last night I had a sleepover at my female friend's studio and I felt so excited as a child looking forward to school outings. If I tried to recall my sleepover experience with my girl friends, there are always long and deep conversations in the darkness before we feel too tired to stay up late anymore.       I enjoy these girl's talk moments a lot as you two could build a genuine and deep connection overnight.  I had that with my best friend in Berkeley and after that night she would head to Los Angeles to travel and go back to China. At that time, I didn't know that we would keep in contact when the exchange semester was over. But luckily, we are still best friends now and I keep sharing my dating experience and relationships, my happiness and sorrow with her. I also had a sleepover with one of my friends in high school. We were not close at that time but at that time our dormmates were all back home and we didn't ...

     one of my favorite movies and books “There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There's .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I'm likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn't trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I'm grateful.” —— the fault in our stars     When we say forever, we know that it can never be a forever because we could die every day or every moment. The commitment is a reckless decision that only people in love will have the courage and certainty to think about a forever with anoth...