Then two days later, I made an update. Then another one a day after that. I was… weblogging! I changed the font colour every day and put a horizontal bar (<hr>) to divide the days. Here are the first three days, reversed from the reverse chronological order how it appeared in the HTML file, complete with formatting. (Note: the font was Arial but I think my Typominima theme CSS template is overwriting that tag.)

April 23, 2002

I have been inspired by this site to do something along the same line. But do you think there is quite enough content going on in my life to post??

These days, it’s nothing but study-study-study. Four more finals to go and my senior year is a closed book! My favourite show, after Star Trek, just started up its final season yesterday and the title character, Felicity, is mulling the implications of her senior year starting. I didn’t see the episode but that’s because I’m saving it as a treat for < 1 week from now!!

April 25, 2002

I saw that Felicity episode today because I took the afternoon and evening off. < WoW > I wish I had seen the episode much earlier this year, like in September when it was supposed to have aired. She is one confused girl and I can really identify with her! There is something iminently scary about having to start my future and that whatever path I take has to be my decision. You know what? I sat there hoping that her parents would just swoop in and enrol her in premed and pay for her fourth year. Even if I don’t agree with a university student having to rack up a student loan (a Chinese thing), I do have to agree with the incomparable feeling of declaring your independence, of asserting your self-sufficiency.

DL recommended me to this site: guicookies. Apparently it’s really new because there only 347 users and I could actually get my own name as my username! *Almost* renders my links page obsolete, which is exactly why Dung recommended it to me because my links page so sucks! :p

April 26, 2002

Today’s font colour is in honour of my extinct “random links” page. Apparently I overwrote it when I was shuffling files on my borg (CS) and is2 (general) accounts and now my carefully cultivated list of links is just a copy of my index file!!

Oh, Berryhill, my choice of graduation photographer, called saying my preview prints are in. I really want to pick them up today! But it can definitely wait until Monday. Three more days to go and that is how much time is left when I start my countdown. My chemistry classmates have been counting down since the beginning of term!

You might not want to join me but I went on a little walk down memory lane and posted from my back-up other posts from around my blogiversary over the years

• 2003: April 22, April 24 - I tend to forget that there were stretches when I went clubbing a lot and I thought I was so intelligent about life decisions
• 2004: April 22, my sister and I went for Indian food in Halifax
• 2005: April 23, marked 3-year blogiversary
• 2006: April 23, a delicious tofu recipe; I also found an April 23 post I wrote for Vancouver Metblogs about the Sun Run
• 2007: April 23, my “I hate cilantro!” post
• 2008: April 21, Sun Run post
• 2009: April 23, marking 7 years
• 2010: April 17, running merchandise for girls
• 2011: April 28, super-fun round-up of places I went to eat during my Easter Toronto trip

Frankly, only the first few years’ posts were fun. Back when I was so blissfully ignorant and young and wrote about everything!

On Saturday and Sunday, I woke up excited to have the same delicious breakfast: fresh made crepes and a mug of malty Ovaltine. I puttered around doing “house things” and on Sunday even got myself out the door to get to the market and then settle in for some regimented study-play for the evenings.

On Saturday, I studied for an hour and then painted for an hour then repeated that twice. I set my iPhone Clock app to the Timer function and it counted down from 55 minutes to give me a few minutes to wrap up or do non-studying and non-play things. On Sunday, I studied for an hour and then did all manners of other “errands” on my computer or worked on my marathon scrapbook. And then, at the end of each evening, a workout in the condo gym. It was an exhilaratingly productive weekend!

Earlier in the week, I added a “study” calendar to my Google Calendar and it works already to keep me accountable and encourage me to have solid blocks of studying time logged.

At a shop in Market Village, Lil Sis and I came across “grown-up paint-by-numbers” and we went gaga for them. She bought two and I mulled and mulled over what scene I wanted to spend hours (and hours and hours) painting. I regretted my lame cafe scene almost right away and wished I had picked the whimsical scene of a Japanese girl standing under a tree on a windy autumn day. Oh well. It’s been fun and somewhat creative. I’ve never been really into using paint let along acrylics but I’m growing to like it and want to make an original canvas next!

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Here is my annotated Asian American Literature Reading Wishlist for 2012:

• Marinaomi’s Kiss & Tell: A Romantic Resume, Ages 0 to 22: I have a hunch that the author saw in passing the book title and tagline from another website of mine; therefore, I need to read this novel to investigate
• Ai Mi’s Under the Hawthorn Tree: it was released as a feature film in 2010
• Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For, chosen by Globe and Mail in 2005 as Best Book
• Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84, a Japanese dystopian novel?
• Kim Thuy’s Ru, winner of the 2010 Governor General’s Literary Award
• Cami Tang’s Sushi Series starting with Sushi for One?, Christian Asian American literature? and I might have to buy it, it not being at the library
• Grace Lin’s Pacy Lin series starting with Year of the Dog, a YA novel I want to give a try
• Paul Yee’s Money Boy, a bit of a YA novel, set in Vancouver that should explore themes I would never have access to
• Paul Yee’s Saltwater City: An Illustrated History of the Chinese in Vancouver, I have my theories about Vancouver Chinese community being different just about everyone else and wonder if this book will help me solve it
• Paul Yee’s Chinatown: An illustrated history of the Chinese Communities of Victoria, Calgary, Winnipeg, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Halifax, I am totally intrigued this book exists
• Bonnie Tsui’s American Chinatown: A People’s History of Five Neighborhoods, the American version about five US Chinatowns
• Erin Khue Ninh’s Ingratitude: the debt-bound daughter in Asian-American Literature, has been on my reading list for a long time but it’s hard to find and I might have to buy it since it is only available at the library in the reference section
• Ying Chen’s Ingratitude keeps showing up in my search for the above volume and I finally read the description (and spoiled myself a little) and I’m a little intrigued now
• Christine Yano’s Airborne Dreams, started this last year and must finish it before proceeding to other (may require a restart, ugh)
• John Jung’s Sweet and Sour, started this last year about Chinese restaurants in America, also need to finish this before starting others
• My Tiger Mom & Me, an anthology of the stories by contest winners and honourable mentions that I considered entering last year; includes the winning story by my bloggie friend, Angela Tung

Then there are novels that I would never pick up and read, but they are intriguing and/or part of popular culture enough that I could be captivated while listening to them in audio book form. It works out well since I will be spending endless hours on treadmills, ellipticals, Stairmasters, and steppers this spring and summer. While it’s brain junk food for me to tune into the reliable Star Trek: Voyager (only on weeknights), some of the storylines in combination with a lame workout can make me feel like I’ve really wasted my time.

I am listening to these books on audio:

• Stephen King’s UR, interestingly penned for Kindle users and then released as an audiobook; this is a cute and geeky literature fantasy novel that I think is appropriate for my first Stephen King novel
• Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, got this as I was browsing audiobooks; I haven’t read a single Stephen King novel but this is format will make the memoir go down
• Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, definitely not my style of novel but it’s so wildlly popular I’ll get it in this format
• Wil Wheaton’s Just a Geek, I would read this book but it’s fun to hear him read his own memoir
• Kathryn Stockett’s The Help, junk food for the brain to get me through a workout
• Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants, even junkier food for the brain to get me through a workout

I’ve been using Arthemia at the old domain for years upon years after I customized it fairly satisfactorily and filled it amply with content. It looks like a freakin’ magazine. Which has its purposes. When I selected Typominima, I justified using a very blog-looking theme over another magazine because [1] I hadn’t ported enough content over and [2] I don’t have the time to customize another magazine theme. It was almost a fluke that I figured out most all of Arthemia. But I also came to love the clean look and feminine feel to Typominima so, as with the rest of life, I am currently loathed to change.

Further, I love the sample content page and looking for reasons to paginate (often) and use intro quotes!

To the online ordering system, I gave my work address as the delivery address because I didn’t want it to go through my apartment concierge for various reasons. I know that both work and concierge are upstanding and ethical people but you can’t blame a girl for wanting to get her hands on the product as soon as the courier brings it, can you?

Just after we hit the Submit button on the order, I cursed because I just remembered that for the rest of the week I was unexpectedly called to work in Office 2, a little walk from Office 1 where it was being sent. But – hallelujah – the precious little notification email from the mailroom came over my lunch hour and I dashed over to get my hot hands on it. And there the innocuous brown box sat for the afternoon in the corner of my cubicle.

What did NPY get me for my birthday (and upcoming anniversary and Christmas)….?

Oooh, what did an NPY get me for my birthday...? Bestest NPY ever! (cc: @whoisnpy) http://t.co/BpBMXQJh

March 16, 2012 3:02 pm via Photos on iOSReplyRetweetFavorite

@whoiswyn

wyn

An 11″ MacBook Air! My first Mac computer! My first ultra-light computer! He didn’t dream up the gift idea all on his own but he’s certainly the most generous and bestest NPY…!

Later in the afternoon, I got a parcel notification to pick up from concierge – those are the best emails – and queued up at the concierge desk for what I swear was ten minutes. I prefer not to interact with them too much because while I’m sure they are intelligent men, they carry out their jobs like bumbling idiots. So slow. So not “city”.

The wait was so long to get served because he was rummaging in the back room for a parcel for the woman ahead of me. He returned empty-handed and it turned out he misheard when she said “Suite 2612″ and looked for “3612″. Sigh. He finally returned and since I had just opened my own Apple brown box, I could see the woman ahead of me received a brown box with the black Apple logo peeking out on the shipping invoice. Looks like someone just got an iPad….

Meanwhile, I was clutching my conspicuous white Apple laptop box since I hadn’t gone upstairs yet. My parcel notification was for a Deal Extreme order that was arriving a mere six weeks after I order it.

At the end of the concierge counter, I noticed a frustrated-looking woman using a MacBook Pro. She indicated to the concierge that the system told her her parcel had been signed for but she did not receive it. The concierge feigned surprise at the news.

On the day the (new) iPad (3) was released and people lined up for hours, I was no where near an Apple store (or coffee shop) and yet non-iPhone Apple products abounded!

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There’s a square of finger-oil you can see on my iPhone screen that shows up even better under different light. It comes from back-to-back-to-back games of Scramble with Friends (freshly brought to us from the team that introduced us to Words with Friends and Hanging with Friends). The latest game is like Boggle so I’ve been dragging my finger across the 4×4 grid of letters frantically for two minutes at a time to create as many words from adjacent letters as possible!

NPY and I are addicted to this game, as we get when new X with Friends word games comes out. In the beginning, I blow NPY out of the water and he grumbles and almost sounds like he will quit because he’s not the wordsmith that I am by comparison. But then he’ll figure out that it’s not merely about knowing more (obscure) words but there is a strategy component to the games. He pursues the strategy and refines his and I start losing and after a certain point, I can’t win any longer and we “retire” the game.

For now, there’s the random and frequent notification bell and the pop-up window that reads “Your move with NPY!” each one of which gets me excited to get into the game and see our scores and play again!

******** This is a blog series complementing my regular blog posts with the original idea was to share our parallel lives, NPY’s and mine, while I’m in Toronto and he’s in Vancouver, 3,400 km away. For me, it’s been pretty fun because I’m this long-time blogger and enjoy repackaging parts of my life in “blog bites”. It’s been more difficult for NPY who hasn’t experienced a change in scenery (although I do not think it is necessary) so I’ll be continuing this with just my photos. I might have something every day. I might not.

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Today was my first day at work after three full months with my firm.

Is it a bad thing to say it feels longer? Generally, yes, but I mean it in the best way possible. I was caught up in training for the first month and then there were Christmas holidays just a month after I joined. We have been super busy so it feels like I’ve squeezed in so much work in the past two months.

Today, I was able to work on a variety of projects and that makes a good day for me. In addition to wrapping up a month-long project on which I was lead, it was a diverse day with financial reports to be edited and a presentation to be created. I did some billing and it always soothes me to work with the system that works like a well-oiled machine.

During training, I learned about my company from a branding perspective. I’m not sure to what extent the other new hires get indoctrinated with the meaning behind the firm’s visual identity but I thought it was a brilliant introduction to the company that has made me a loyal fan–I considered decorating my apartment in company colours and I certainly want an umbrella that evokes the company! And at times when I want to give up, say to myself, “This is good enough,” I repeat the company’s tagline to myself and forge on. It is because the tagline succinctly captures what I’ve been drilled all my life to believe and strive for: Quality in Everything We Do. I want to embody that in everything I do at work, and then have that trickle into my personal life.

And to mark the beginning of a new “quarter”, today was filled with learning and paying it forward. I learned new tips and tricks about the software we use that makes me more productive and feel like I’m beginning to be a power user. I learned more about the “theory” behind our enterprise systems from another colleague which increasingly puts into perspective the whole process and the part we play. I feel I work pretty independently for the length of time I have been with firm. And then I “paid it forward” when I gave tips to another colleague. It was a good day.

******** This is a blog series complementing my regular blog posts with the original idea was to share our parallel lives, NPY’s and mine, while I’m in Toronto and he’s in Vancouver, 3,400 km away. For me, it’s been pretty fun because I’m this long-time blogger and enjoy repackaging parts of my life in “blog bites”. It’s been more difficult for NPY who hasn’t experienced a change in scenery (although I do not think it is necessary) so I’ll be continuing this with just my photos. I might have something every day. I might not.

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********

Unbearable Lightness is Porta de Rossi’s 2010 memoir of the dark and difficult events of 1998 and 1999 when she joined the cast of Ally McBeal. It has been sitting on my e-reader (i.e., iPhone) for a while and I cracked into it in the fall as a stimulating activity to stave off falling asleep during my commuter train ride to and from work.

I watched my fair share of Ally McBeal because my sister watched it but I did not really enjoy it. As one who takes things way too literally, I did not enjoy the fantasy sequences that dominated the narrative and I only paid more attention when Lucy Liu became a regular and this brilliant man-eating ice queen character with beautiful blonde hair also joined the cast. I paid more attention to the tabloids wherein Calista Flockhart was regularly flogged in the press for her ultra-slight figure and then we heard that other people on set (Courtney Thorne-Smith and Portia) were getting really thin, speculated because they had to “keep up”. Next thing I knew, Portia de Rossi came out and stepped out with Ellen DeGeneres and that brings us to today! Apparently Portia had really great gigs on Arrested Development and Better Off Ted.

Unbearable Lightness starts with the end of Portia’s marriage and the beginning of her time on Ally McBeal. An Australian model-turned-actress with a slim acting reel at that time, she’s insecure about joining a hot show and constantly questions why they would want her. Years of being in the modeling world resulted in her self-worth being tied to standing out, being considered special, and that always seemed to include being thin. She goes back to her days in high school and modeling days when her glamorous modeling did the job of setting her apart but also instilled in her the habits of eating, purging, and crash dieting. When she joined Ally McBeal, she was not yet ready to come out, partly because she was joining as a hot sex symbol. Meanwhile, Ellen was out, Portia read Betty DeGeneres’ memoir Love, Ellen, and Portia sees Ellen a role model. Her publicist and marketing people spin a different story, projecting Portia as naive-come-icon who had it all together. For example, the press made it out as if Portia gave up a career in law to act (which fit well with her role on a legal dramedy) while in reality she wasn’t that directional in her life choices. While the novel is about her long journey to self-acceptance, you also get a glimpse behind-the-scenes of the hit show and the beginning of Portia and Ellen’s relationship. For someone who doesn’t devour tabloids, it was a refreshing point of view into things otherwise so public.

Apparently I didn’t watch Ally much and did not know that Portia de Rossia stands at the height of 5’7″ (170 cm); rather I thought she was around 5’3″. So when she moaned about hitting 130 lbs, I naively nodded in agreement that she needed to shed some weight to be in line with her industry perhaps; afterall, aren’t those 6-foot tall models who look like sticks just 110 lbs? At first, Portia’s obsession about food was cute and quirky and someone who sticks so steadfast to discipline and deprivation is admirable as a “perfectionist” with the ultimate self-control. It is, for a moment, more comfortable for her deprive herself than hear about what she at during a binge. As the obsession grew, her writing voice changed to one irrational and sounding very much like petulant adolescent. Ultimately, in the final chapter, it was really sad because she had reach a goal weight of under 100 lbs (as low as 82 lbs) and she was still miserable and, by then, very sick. The road to recovery is slow and painful because the ego needs to be mended and it can make you do funny things to protect itself until you fully trust in the recovery, i.e., binging again. I was a little disappointed with her dissection about being a recovered anorexic, how she broke through, but happy in all that there was no lasting physical damage.

All the while I was reading the memoir, I was thinking about how a multimedia supplement would have been interesting (and sensational, which did not jive with the book)–that is, when she was really nervous and feeling unworthy on her first day on the Ally set and delivering her first lines, how did it actually look to the rest of us? When she was upset about her Rolling Stone and Shape covers, feeling like an imposter and/or having crash dieted and not felt adequate, how did she really look? How did she look at 130 lbs, really? At which weight did she look healthiest and strike the balance with her industry’s demands? How does she look today?

Like every other woman in this country, I’m constantly “watching what I eat” and have resigned myself, as if it was some lofty goal, that I could never be anorexic. It is really ugly in there and, bottom line, the issues at the root do not disappear with the weight.

Grad Student Etiquette from PhD Comics

Yikes, so we closed November 2011 and my NaNoWriMo word count is 27,638, half of a fairly short 50K-word novel. I outlined quite a bit ahead but life happened. For full disclosure, I actually wrote seven days’ worth in October (!) because I knew I would be in New York 1-7 November and only wrote 8 days in November proper. :o

My very first gap in writing started on 11/11/11, the day I went from unemployed with no prospects to unemployed with future employment. Then there was the scramble to get everything in order while I still had whole days free. Mum came to town because there was a funeral and the whole family gathered together for a weekend. Then I took a look at my study schedule and realized I must finish a course by 1 December! These are legitimate reasons, no? :)

I also hit a wall in writing. It came to a point where I could not face the subject material and not so much because I had spent too long on it. You see, I was writing a “romance novel”, fictionalizing a relationship that preceded NPY. It was a bit of a metaphor for taking chances and the story became a bit Eat, Pray, Love-like which was fine for a while but then I didn’t believe EPL is so great after all and I no longer had the same steam to write about events that are temporally so close. So maybe there will be enough distance, enough answers come through, that I can continue when I’m off for Christmas….

A bonus is that the souvenirs do not scream “tourist!” so much as other merchandise and transit (design) enthusiasts with some civic pride will also be interested in transit merchandise.

Recently, blogTO published a post to stir up some discussion about desirable merchandise to be sold in a reincarnation of the TTC gift shop. It’s a nice idea but TTC management is working out other issues at present and souvenir sales revenue is not a priority. I’m pretty vanilla and would like to pick up my TTC (and GO Transit) shot glass and colourful reusable totebag with the system maps but other people are way more creative than I am. Thus I was surfing all morning around related links, reminiscing, and generally procrastinating from studying….

Back when I was in junior high or high school, I was in Toronto over school break and hanging out with my cousin Sandy. She lived in North York at the time and one afternoon we accomplished one of her city goals in that we rode all along the Yonge-University-Spadina Line and collected a transfer at each station. I’m pretty sure I still have that bundle of transfers somewhere. More recently, Toronto NaNoWriMos did a Subway Write-In, and rode the whole Yonge-University-Spadina Line–about 3 hours–while writing up a storm and I dearly wished I could have gone but had other commitments to attend to.

Even more interesting than my vanilla “put the transit map on a bag” idea, are the pins for each of the TTC stations, coloured by the stations’ familiar tile colours. I don’t know what I would do with so many pins so I may prefer the them as pushpins or really strong magnets.

We were waiting for a table at “Din Tai Fung” a little while ago and saw someone else was waiting for a table and poring over a new book he bought, Transit Maps of the World. Lil Sis and I also looked at the book over his shoulder trying to guess the cities, laughing when one was particularly dense or sparse. I think I would like this coffee table book as well, but I’m not that interested in the bulk of the maps if I don’t have much connection to the city. I simply have to visit the cities, too!

Did you know there is a TTC font, Toronto Subway Regular? To me, it kind of looks like Helvetica but font enthusiasts would be quick to disagree! It can be purchased for $25.

I like the idea of removable wall decals but how to choose just one station?

I love this Jonathan Guy collage poster of the stations on the Yonge-University-Spadina and Bloor-Danforth line. It is made from photographs from each station and a good refresher of the stations’ colours. I grew up with the TTC and MTR (Hong Kong) station colours and you just have to glimpse the colour and know where you are if you’ve missed the announcement. In Vancouver, the stations are all white and you have to cran your neck to look up out of the train to orient yourself.

Finally, this doesn’t have to do with transit but that’s where all the sleuthing takes you, I learned that the following poster prints using typography to show neighbourhoods in a city are called Ork Posters. I love looking at the cities I know and have lived in. Like in Vancouver, I lived in Fairview while NPY is in Hastings Sunrise (I think). The Toronto Ork Poster is insane! Either Toronto is too subdivided and enthusiastic about naming everything or perhaps Ork went down too low a level? I think Toronto’s currently the densest of the Ork Posters!