Done with finals! (Part Two)

Let’s just continue my story from last time.

Yeah, indeed, I should’ve treated Nicki better. I think that should be a life lesson for me: Never judge someone based on the way he/she looks. Gosh, testosterone makes me do dumb stuff. I don’t want to blame it on my testosterone, it’s just me. It’s scientifically approved that testosterone make people do dumb stuff tho, it’s true. From now on, everytime I see a girl that I like, I’ll remind myself to look deeper into her personality. That’s the strategy that I talked about in the previous blog, strategies to change myself little by little. I will be a better person as time progresses, believe that.

Let’s continue.

After Wednesday I’m pretty much done with my classes, except my writing class— because I need to turn in my final portfolio the next day and that worth something like 30% of my grade. I wrote about racism. I know that the topic of racism is really really risky and my political view might be different from my teachers and that might play a very crucial role in the grading of my paper. However, I took the risk and wrote about racism in America, with an attitude that is completely honest and straighforward. I said everything I want to say about racism in my final essay and I provided my political view in it. I loved it. A lot of the places might sounds a little bit harsh, even cynical, but that’s what I want to say about racism and I said it the way I want to say it. When I finished my essay there was only one thing left in me — joy. It’s such a rewarding experience just to read my essay because after so much work, everything is just coming together. I still remember at the beginning of the semester I wrote about how I want my readers to be able to feel my emotions as they read my words, I think I was able to do that in this last essay.

What I want to say about racism is that everyone is racist, consciously or unconsciously, because we are humans and we disagree with each other. There are two factors that cause racism, one of them is ideas. We have different ideas, and ideas form our identity. People with the same identity will gather together to form groups, or subcultures, and that’s what separates people. It’s one group verses another, or, one race verses another in this case, and everyone in the group wants to make sure that his/her group gets to survive and flourish. Thus, we think other groups, or those groups that we don’t identify ourselves with, are worse than, if not as good as, our own group. That’s racist. The belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races. That’s racism, in the micro view, it’s just one group verses another. Another factor that contribute to racism is pride. We have pride, everyone does, don’t bullshit me. Those who says they are humble and they don’t have pride are the biggest hypocrites. It’s not that being humble is bad. I’m humble, jeez, I’m very humble among my peers. It’s just that being humble doesn’t interfere with having pride. We have pride and we think ourselves as good. Over the years, people tried to solve this problem by applying good education to the young. That doesn’t solve the problem at all, and it makes it even worse. I don’t have anything against education, just to be clear. I loved education and I’m eager to learn. I loved pretty much everything about education except that it make us know much more about ourselves. That leads to more pride. The more we know about ourselves, the more pride we have, the more racist we get. However the good thing is, education has achieved the task of making people polite. The advantage that I have right now comparing to the Asians living in the U.S. 30 years ago is that, I’m confronting the nicest white people America has ever produced in the daily bases. Let’s just hope America keeps producing nicer and nicer white people.

Yeah I said it, I said it. Deal with it.

Damn that was good, you know, getting things out of my chest.

You might disagree with my view, you might even hate it. Still, I want to make myself clear. I have no problem with any group in the society, I pay them respect and love. Everyday I pray to the Lord to be a good person.

Then there’s the study period for my finals.

I only have two other finals to take: Physics and Psychology.

I was confident about my physics exam but I actually got a better score in my psych exam. I didn’t study for physics until the day I took the exam. Yeah I’m weird like that. I started to study for psych early this time, considering the fact that I did bad in the second midterm because I procrastinated until pretty much the last day to study. I did decent in psych, I got a B. I got a C in physics but since I had a solid be in physics class so I ended up with a B for physics and a B- for psych. I’m happy with my GPA at the end. I ended up with a 3.2

Not as good as I expected, but I see plenty of room for improvement.

And then, I relapsed.

I realized (I don’t know how many times I have to realize the same thing again) that I should play league. Asceticism is not the answer, moderation is the answer. League of Legends has become such a big part of my life and I feel torturous without it. Let’s face it Ronnie. I know playing league of legends is taking up a lot of time, but we can deal with it. I just need to work on the strategies. When there’s problem, I don’t run away from it, I deal with it. That’s what I should do. From now on, if I don’t finish my work for the day, I won’t play league of legends, that’s it. That’s my strategy for the future. And again, asceticism is not the answer, moderation is the answer.

It’s finally the time that I can be honest to myself and face my obstacles. I can tell myself without any hesitation that I have problems, indeed I do, and there are a lot of them. But we can deal with them, and we just need strategies. I’m working on it.

I spent the next few days in Santosh’s house. We took the bus to NYC, then we took another bus to Parsippany, that’s where he lives. It’s a beautiful town with not a lot of people. I think. I really enjoyed the quiet time in his house, I really did. I have a whole lot of stuff to say about Santosh’s house.

Santosh is a big football fan, and he takes football seriously, very seriously. We didn’t do much on the first day we arrive because it was late already, something like 10:00PM by the time we arrived at his house. The second day was pretty good. I woke up at like 11:00AM, something like that. I got enough rest and I was all happy all that. His cousins came in the afternoon and they were playing some Maden 15 football on his play station. We watched movies at night, pretty much all of the nights that I stayed in his house. Here’s the thing. Santosh takes football seriously, and his parents take movie as seriously as football for Santosh. In the basement, his parents has a whole setup of home-theater. The whole set up. From the big projector to the surround sound speakers, or the super comfortable recliner. Everything, they’ve got everything you need for a near movie theater experience.

We watched guardians of the galaxy on Friday night, then on Saturday night we watched the equalizer. We didn’t watch anything on Sunday night since Roopa has to go to school on Monday. Then Monday night we watched Transformers: Age of Extinction. I loved the experience, it’s just like in the theater. I liked the movie equalizer a lot, because it’s got Denzel, a hot girl, a fat guy who defines himself as strong and protective in the end, and you got a Russian guy. What else can you ask for in a movie, right? The movie was tense, and it was awesome, loved it.

I have to spend some words to talk about Santosh’s mom. Her cooking is the BOMB, no shit. I haven’t tried any Indian food my entire life, and this first experience really gave me a good impression for Indian food. I saw Santosh eating with his hands! That’s how you’re supposed to eat Indian food, but I did it with a spoon. Still, it’s tasty as fuck. The main idea of his mom’s cooking is to make side dishes to eat with rice, different kinds of rice. White, brown, yellow, fried, different kinds of rice. And the side dishes are what makes her cooking unique and different. The side dishes are all sauce like dishes, they are all cooked with different, and many kinds, of spices. You mix the side dishes and the rice together and eat it. The rice is well cooked, MUCH BETTER THAN THE WARREN DINING HALL RICE! I like the texture of the rice. She sometimes do things a little bit creative. One night, she offers some crispy fries on the side, so when we mix the side dishes and the fries, it adds the crunchy texture to the whole dish and makes it multi-layered. I don’t really like spicy food but her cooking really got me into enjoying spicy food. All of the dishes have different layers of flavor, and you can’t taste the spicy part on the first bite. That kinda created a problem for me, because my mouth feels like burning every time after eating, and it lasts for a while. Anyway, Santosh’s mom is great at cooking.

I think that’s a wrap. Since I’m in New York right now, I’ll keep the blog updated.

OJ keeps it real.

“Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.” Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.” — Luke 2:11–14