tetleytee

If you haven’t seen it, there’s this talk that’s been uploaded onto the internet for a while now that I highly recommend. It’s called The Last Lecture and it’s by Prof Randy Pausch. He talked at Carnegie Mellon University for a series called Journeys (previously called The Last Lecture series) and it basically provided professors to speak about personal experiences and lessons learned that they can impart on the students and brains of the future.

Randy was scheduled to present his talk in September of 2007. But that August, he was diagonised a second time with pancreatic cancer and that he should expect to only have three to six months of good health left. Despite this news, Randy prepared and presented his Last Lecture during his scheduled slot. His main reason for doing so was simply to have a recorded memory of his best advice so that his kids (at that point his oldest child was aged 6) could see their dad in his best element.

His amazing story comes with many lessons that we can take away into our every day lives. He tells this story about how he wanted to take this job outside of the university that was quite difficult for him to obtain. And the lesson was that there are always brick walls in life. Brick walls are there to show yourself how truly bad you want something; it’s to filter out those who aren’t as passionate. How amazing! How many times have I looked at a daunting task and turned the other way because I felt my efforts would get me nowhere? How fantastic it is to have this lesson retaught to us – I know I forget this sort of thing in every day life.

Randy also wrote a book before he passed away in July of 2008. The book is also entitled The Last Lecture, and I’m only half-way through reading it but I love it. The day the doctor told him that his time left was less than a year, he and his wife cried in the doctor’s office. After all the discussions, they left together and Randy thought about what he had told his wife just before going into the appointment:

“Even if the scan results are bad tomorrow, I just want you to know that it feels great to be alive, and to be here today, alive with you. Whatever news we get about the scans, I’m not going to die when we hear it. I won’t die the next day, or the day after that, or the day after that. So today, right now, well this is a wonderful day. And I want you to know how much I’m enjoying it.”

I want this to be how I live my life, every day. And while I work towards this, I will also look to finding a brick wall I feel is worth it for me to climb over.

Please watch the lecture if you haven’t already.

Two things which I remember and love from Elaine’s wedding:

“It’s coming all over the place!!”
- Elaine, referring to her veil not staying in place and the fact that it was windy outside.

“I’m so happy my daughter has finally found the white man”
- Elaine’s dad, whose Chinese accent had us all cracking up at the head table as he described Nathan to be the right man for his daughter.

All in all it was a great wedding. It was probably one of the few times I actually got to see her new husband three days in a row (usually I’d see him… never), and it’s been years since I’ve seen Ivano. I also got to see the newlywed couple the next day and boy were they hungover. And it’s really amusing to see a bunch of peppy old Chinese people, and a bunch of young hungover adults trying to eat lunch together at a busy dim sum restaurant. Congratulations to the new Mr. & Mrs.!

I love the Old Spice commercial “The Man Your Man Can Smell Like“. It’s awesome because by the time the commercial ends you think “what on earth just happened?!”. I reference this commercial now because I think this is how my life is. I’m focused on something and even though I’m extremely focused on it, there is something happening in the background that I don’t quite understand or don’t realize or don’t pay attention to, and then suddenly I’m stunned that whatever was happening in the background is now front-and-center and has my undivided attention, but I don’t know how it got there!

When I fly out on Wednesday, I will have spent a total of 2 weeks in Toronto, with almost all of it being vacation. During my time here, I got to not only help Elaine out during her wedding, but I’ve also had the opportunity meet with a few friends who I hardly get to see and spend time talking to my parents. Usually when I book a trip back home, I complain that it’s not really a vacation because I usually work out of Toronto to save my vacation days, and I don’t have a lot of time to see other people, but with two weeks here and me actually making an effort to meet up with people, I feel that this trip has been truly a great experience. Every now and then people need to take that step away from their regular path and look sideways and see what’s passing by.
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when I’m riding in the back of my parents car and I look out of the window and I see flat land for miles and miles and big looming fluffy clouds overhead. If you think about it, we’re all so tiny on such a big plot of land. One of my favourite things to do is to stand under a tree on a beautiful sunny blue-skied day and look up at the green leaves to see the sparkles of sun peeking through. I’m constantly mesmorized by the fact that the tree has been around for longer than I’ve been alive and still continues to grow so big and so tall that I can stand under one, reach up, and still not touch it’s lowest branch. I love being under a giant tree because it reminds me of how amazing nature is, and I don’t even have to go far to give myself a reality check – even on the streets downtown I can easily find a tree to look up at on any street there. Sometimes I get carried away with amazement that I end up causing people being me to grumble as they suddenly have to dodge a crazy person staring at a tree during rush hour shuffle.
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I’ve been having massive anxiety issues lately. I’ve been unable to sleep without panicking that my apartment will collapse on me. I’ve been unable to ride the skytrain without thinking it will suddenly stop and I will be stuck there indefinitely with no way out because I’m either underground or high above it. I’ve had trouble riding crowded busses because I’m worried about traffic and how I might never make it to the next stop, especially if the traffic spans over a bridge.

I have agoraphobia. And it is recent. Like within the last month recent. And even talking about it now is making me a little anxious. I get worried that I’m not getting enough air. My muscles tense up, I feel like I should run away, and my heart feels like it’s being squeezed by a giant hand. If I get really scared I start shaking, and I probably have the expression of some caged animal, and I hyperventilate which probably doesn’t help. I feel like I’m going to go aboslutely crazy and I’ll explode and will have to be carried away to a crazy house.
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After watching the Wheelchair Curling semi-finals, my friends and I wandered down to Main Street to see what lunch options awaited us. Someone had mentioned that there was a No. 1 Noodle House that had opened up at Main and King Edward, and we all eagerly went in search for some Taiwanese beef noodle soup to warm us up. When we arrived, John and I were surprised to see that the restaurant was in fact Beefy Beef Noodle House, a place we had made fun of previously while wandering Main because of it’s strange name and the fact that the sign above the restaurant literally read “Beefy Beef Noodle House: Salty Peppery Chicken”. But the restaurant inside was actually quite nicely decorated – very similar to the No. 1 in Burnaby. I was extremely pleased about this connection, since I love the salty peppery chicken, and thus declared my lunch order without hesitation before we even got our table. We had a great waitress who knew all the items on the menu, so when I said “A10″, she repeated back to me what the item was. We then tested her knowledge with all our orders and only stumped her once.
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The other day I had a craving for sushi, so I decided to try a Japanese restaurant that recently opened up. They boast a healthier option to Japanese food with organic greens, no additives, all their rolls being made from brown rice and being MSG free. I ordered take out from their little restaurant, but the interior looks like a cozy place to enjoy some lunch with friends.

Seating interior at Shizenya

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On New Years Eve in 1996, my brother and I had dinner with our family and then quickly begged to be dropped off at Mel Lastman Square. To help ring in the new year the city was throwing a free concert performed by the Foo Fighters, and I wanted to be there so badly. I remember discussing a designated meeting area, taking off my glasses and putting them in my pocket for safe-keeping, and charging into that mosh pit as a fearless little asian kid. Elaine and I squirmed our way to the front, jumped around a whole lot, and then did some crowd surfing. Somewhere along the way, I lost my glasses and no one showed up to the meeting area, but I was okay because I stumbled my way blindly to a payphone and pumped in a quarter and fumbled with the home phone number to get my daddy to pick me up. And I had a blast. The joy of being in a concert with all that live music, of being with a bunch of people who were there to enjoy it as much as you, it was thrilling!

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So I got home yesterday after work to find something stuck to my front door:

What's this?

Hurray! A post-it note surprise! Once upon a time when the hubs and I were first going out he used to leave me post-it notes all the time on my dorm door. And because I love notes, our 9 month anniversary consisted of a whole room full of post-its saying “I Love You”. I love the sappiness.

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As I was writing thank you cards, I re-read one from my aunt where she wrote in Chinese: 百年好合

tee: ‘bat leen ho cup’?
a: ‘bat leen ho hup‘
tee: what does that mean?
a: a hundred years of being together
tee: give me another sentence with the word ‘hup’ in it
a: um…
tee: ‘hup an fun’? (which means to sleep)
a: … yes. may you sleep for a hundred years.

100 done, another … 60 or so more to go. Oh boy.