The weather in New York this year was indeed like a moody woman. Spring was unusually hot, the beginning of summer unusually cold and rainy. Much to my woe, the weather swing and the overkill of VACC have negated any effort to train for an early summer marathon, like I did last year. A fall marathon also seems out of the question, as law school looms in the horizon. I've always wanted to run Miami in January, but the crisp memory of training in the New York winter immediately deterred my faint spark of motivation. On a good note, I found out that the Hash Harriers have chapters in both Ho Chi Minh City and Ha Noi! For those of you who are not familiar, the Hashs proudly call themselves "a drinking group with a running problem." Their runs, often organized as a treasure hunt with cryptic marks on trees and whatnots, always end in clashing beer bottles at a local bar. A coworker has many times lobbied me to join, but I never went in New York, simply because I was not that much into drinking, let along drinking right after a run. The Hashs' operations in Viet Nam however seem very interesting. Since the cities are unsurprisingly too crowded and polluted, they often take runners out to the countryside, about an hour away by bus, where Hashers are free to roam on paddy fields under the flawless blue sky. I know instantly that I will absolutely love to join. For those of you in Ha Noi this summer, check out their website: http://www.hanoih3.com/ They meet every Sat at 2PM at the American Club on Hai Ba Trung Street.

Wow, can you believe it, two days till Christmas! Unfortunately this year I didn't make it out of the city. The lack of vacation days, my cousins visiting and law school stress resulted in zero planning for the holiday. Given my blank 250-word essay for Yale, and the many scholarship essays in need of being written, I tried to convince myself that it would actually be a smart choice to stay in the city and get some work done. Wishful thinking, of course. It isn't easy with so many visitors dropping in and out of my apartment. I had a hard time saying no to traveling college students, who reminded me of my homeless self not so long ago. As a result, three teenagers now occupied my couch, gobbling up all the food in the fridge and talking "xi` tin" 9-X dialogues I'm too old to understand. Ah, youth.

I love the first week of December! December 7 features me dragging home at 10pm drained and stressed - what can you do, when your boss is freaked out, it's your duty to also sweat - to find a big, very purple envelop hovering under Mugg's giant grin. "It says NYU", he did a little dance. I hungrily tore the envelop apart, then did a long ridiculous dance myself.

In at NYU!

What a great relief, since this means that I have an option to stay in the Big Apple, keep my perfect apartment, breathe Central Park air, and well, enroll at a top-5 (US News ranking) law school in the nation! NYU is also ranked 2nd nationwide in International Law, which is a field I am interested in pursuing. Woohoo!


And today, my status checker changed to "Decision Rendered" at Cornell. The admission office was nice enough to tell me the decision on the phone - I'm in, and invited for the Dean's Scholarship! I have been scared multiple times by Mugg's endless snow storms tales from his undergrad years in Ithaca, but still am extremely happy. Cornell is a beautiful place, and has much to offer with its small class size and a liberal-arts-ish environment.


Five down - still 10 more to go, including one visible elephant i.e. the Yale apps. I definitely plan to finish it before the holidays, before the flurry of visitors will keep me breathless. Where I end up next year will largely depend on where Mugg will be, so crossing fingers for us both!

And on a non-law yet amazing note: a good friend of mine told me yesterday that she is pregnant! I can't even describe how happy I am, for I know that this baby will be in the best hands for all his/her life. My friend used an expression that I've never heard before, that she cannot wait to fall in love with her child. Wow. I feel like we take for granted that we must love our family, yet know fully well that it sometimes is the hardest thing. But to be truly fall in love with your child, your mom, your dad, how amazing that must feel like. I'm planning to stop by a baby store to get the expectant mom a present, and also a gift for the new-born son of my middle-school friend. She was the first to get married, and the first to have a kid, pioneering the 86-ers rite to adulthood. The new lives of my friends make me feel a bit more grown up, and definitely put my trivial stress on work and law school in perspective. Yes, it is a soft and gentle reminder - there are more important things in life.

:-)

Miami still awes me with its sense of space. Every night, Mugg and I take a walk along the surburban neighborhood of Pembroke, whose concentric circles of houses interlaced into a sort of maze. We'd walk for hours, talk about our future, stop to observe a cute wandering cat, chase each other through the high neatly trimmed trees lining down the road. It feels funny to be in surburbia.

On Thanksgiving night, we joined a party with another Chinese family at their house. The husband is an amazing cook. My eyes grew in bewilderment as he glided his big, iron chef knife across the cutboard, twirled home-grown vegetables into neat stacks and molded pearl-white buns. I sat with the parents, listening amorously to their tales of the early days in the US, while Mugg engaged in a Wii battle with the family's kids, a 6-year-old and a teenager. The Chinese lady nudged me with her elbow, "Your boyfriend is so playful!" Mugg's mom nodded, "He grew up a good kid." I suddenly felt warm from the inside out. It has been too long since I last rocked in a comfortable chair, listened to small talk, and stuffed my tummy with a delicious family dinner.

The next day, we went to South Beach, where the warm sunlight and light breeze immediately knocked us into a long nap on the sand. I woke up dazed, staring straight into the immensely open sky above, and blanked out for a full minute before remembering that I was still on Earth. It's the oddest feeling to realize that - oh right, I'm human.

At midnight, we went with Mugg's friend to catch the first show of Ninja Assassin - a bloody, anime-esque action saga that features very real six packs from, guess who, the girly Korean singer Bi/Rain. Albeit the (always) unnecessary Hollywood violence, I was pretty amused, especially when an Europol agent snidely commented that "This guy [Bi] looks more like he belongs to a boyband than in a ninja club" - right before being slashed in two, of course.

At 3am, as the battles wore off the screen, we walked through the empty arches of the Miami mall and drove home. I rolled down the window, so the wind blew my hair into a mess and scattered Gun N' Roses "Take me down to paradise city, where the grass is green and the girls are pretty..." along the highway. The smell of the night was intoxicated.

"Why is the sky blue?" I turned to Mugg, "Just imagine if it were some odd colors - like bad-cheese yellow."

"It's the way molecules in the air reflecting light. It just happens to be in a spectrum that our eyes can see. And it just happens to be in the blue range of the spectrum."

Seriously, it is but a stroke of random luck that the molecules float around in the right way, so that I get the mood-lifting joy each time I look at the sky?

I took a deep breath and held tight to Mugg's hand, floored with gratitude. Oasis came on the radio. And I suddenly felt like I could live forever.

Last weekend, I met up with Yuko for a 5 miles race to kick off the famous New York marathon in Central Park. The air was crisp and cold; the leaves have started turning colors. I haven't seen Yuko in a while - she was busy with the new job and I with applications. It was good to catch up - we talked about a friend's upcoming wedding, Stuyvesant Town and the East Village life I have not frequented since moving out. We of course talked about Yuko's love life and a recent disappointment. I tried to encourage her but knew that when one was waiting, any wait no matter no short was excruciating. We talked about the loneliness of the city - one easily got lost in such a big place. But it will be okay, we consoled each other, because we are young, and the night is young.

The past few months have been, no doubt, the busiest months I have had in the past two years in the city. After the marathon at the end of May, things were unraveling so quickly that I barely had time to catch a breath, let alone blogging. As a result, nothing has been written in a long while. But now that the sun has found its way back over the green foliage outside 70th street, and summer has made it bright albeit late appearance over the city, life has finally mellowed down. This morning, after a round of egg benedicts topped with salmon for breakfast, while waiting for a loaf of banana bread to brown in the oven, I suddenly found myself out of inspiration for the law school essays. What better to do, then, than blogging.

Last week, New York suddenly sparked light. Some wise organizers at the NYRR had decided to cancel the Moore Marathon due to the temperature approaching a dangerous 90 plus degree. Too excited for the sun and not as wise, I dash out in haste for the 7-mile stretch along the Hudson River, which very soon resulted in two scorching red shoulders that still ache under my shirt no matter how much aloe vera was applied. Apparently I've taken the majority of advices from the Suncreen song to heart, but ignore the foremost and most famous of them all:

"If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience.

Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.

Don't be reckless with other people's hearts. Don't put up with people who are reckless with yours.

Stretch.

Maybe you'll marry, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll have children, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll divorce at 40, maybe you'll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's.

Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft.

Travel.

Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders.

But trust me on the sunscreen."

I have recently found my fix for red-eyed days at work, and a very cheesy one at that - the Wedding and Celebration section of the New York Times. It started innocently. I was browsing the 'Bates Alumni in the News' bulletin one day, and tumbled on an article of a Batesie girl who proclaimed herself a free spirit, left her college love to explore the world, came back years later and eventually got married to the high school sweetheart. Finding myself surprisingly happy at her tale, I frequented the section a few days later to read about an oldies couple who got married for the second time after they had divorced over growing apart. From then on, I make a point to visit the Happy Page once a week. Marriages of all types, between all sorts of people, were reported. Many have met online. Many have broken up multiple times. Many have been threatened with break-ups and succumbed. Those stories never fail to delight me with their sweet endings. It is a comfort, after all, to know that romance is alive, out there, achievable to normal people of all sizes and shapes.

Albeit short, the 4-mile loop from Stuy-Town to midtown east is my favorite route. Past the UN, there is a small steep hill to climb, followed by a rewarding downhill stretch. I love that the route is easily adjusted, using the rule of thumb that about 18 New York streets make up 1 mile, and an avenue length-wise is about 3 streets. The real kick of the run, however, is the midway stop I always make at Mugg's to grab a gulf of water, drop off a sweaty layer, or most of the time solely and happily just to steal a kiss.


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The crisp New York morning was bitingly cold. 28 degree - said the temperature billboard at one brownstone corner in Midtown East. Random patches of sunshine scattered on Fifth Avenue, polished shinny store banners perching on top of the impeccable glass windows of Abercrombie, Gucci, Apple, Tiffany. Few passerbys wandered happily along the cobblestones surrounding Central Park, alongside tourists in decorative carriages, whose eyes opened wide with excitement like those of children. Unlike the passengers whom they carried, the horses decked up with bright red pompom meekly clucked their steel shoes at the driver's nudge, their heads hanging low, their jaws sluggishly grinding some leftover straws. It was a normal lazy New York sunday.

Sáng thứ bảy, một tia nắng lẻ loi đâm xuyên qua tấm rèm nặng trĩu trên cửa sổ nhà anh, hạ cánh nhẹ nhàng xuống những thời báo kinh tế của anh, những quyển sách luyện thi của tôi, nằm ngổn ngang trên sàn nhà gỗ. Tôi tỉ mẩn đếm những vết rạn trên trần nhà, đợi chuông báo thức rung để nhanh tay tắt máy trước khi anh kịp giật mình tỉnh dậy. Gỡ tay mình ra khỏi tay anh, tôi nhón chân chầm chậm đi qua sàn nhà cọt kẹt, luồn vào chiếc váy thoải mái nhất, vừa chải tóc vừa sao lãng quét mascara lên mi mắt. Tóc tôi đã dài đủ để kẹp lên gọn gàng sau gáy, những dải tóc nhuộm đỏ ngày xưa đã phết đi gần hết, chỉ còn đuôi tóc đâu đây hơi hoe vàng. Trong guơng, một gương mặt nghiêm trang nhìn tôi chăm chú, vạt nâu dưới mắt, hướng mày xếch, khoé môi cong. Rất lạ lẫm, không giống gì con bé tóc ngắn, toe toét, luôn bồn chồn thời đại học.

Như thể từ trong một màn sương loãng dần, trên đầu tôi bỗng hiện ra đôi mắt nheo ngái ngủ của anh, nửa lo lắng nửa trìu mến, "Trang, sao em chưa đi? Em sắp muộn rồi!"

Tôi nhìn sững anh, như thể vừa chợt nhớ ra điều gì. Chợt nhớ rằng tôi không còn là con bé thời đại học cần sải chân đi khắp thế giới để tìm hạnh phúc nữa. Đơn giản bởi vì hạnh phúc... là đây.

When today is not your perfect day - like, you are sick, you face is stuffy, your LSAT score is on the decline, you forget the cell at your bf's so no goodnight kissy, your homework is due tomorrow - yeah, I mean a totally sucky day, what's left to do but envision a perfect day?

The dreaded winter has made its way back to New York, and cast a depressing drizzle onto the pitch black marble wall of 1166 Avenue of the Americas. Esther walked by my cube everyday, peered out at the gray sky, and sadly declared that the next time we saw a sunny day would be next April - half a year from now!

To echo the weather, I was in a gray lousy mood. With the election closing in, Mary and I have actively talked for Barack: we have been making calls to swing states, hoping to sway voters. We convened on Monday in an empty conference room during lunch hour to call Pennsylvania. People on my calling list were, as a statement of fact, old. I talked to more than a dozen of 80 something crowd, who were exceptionally grumpy - due to the freezing rain or maybe because I had interrupted their afternoon nap? Usually I love older people and love how they remind me of a long future ahead, but the oldies in Penn state sucessfully lauched me a very very grumpy early-20's crisis. Ack.

To the least of my expectations, waking up early has put such a strain on me and Mugg. We have always been night-owls, staying up till 3am on a workday to blast guitar hero then crawling in to work at 10 (that's a particular thing I love about NERA). Our schedule, however, grew apart as I now woke up at 6am and went running, effectively waking Mugg up with my shuffling on his old squeaky wooden floor. He still went to bed at 3am, meaning that I would get no sleep from my new bedtime of midnight till 3 due to his loud baseball games and shuffling. As a result we were both haggard, cranky, and complaining that we didn't get enough attention from each other the next day.

Ack ack.

I'm glad that October is soon over, so soon I can cross off exciting activities that nonetheless have crowded out the more important things on my priority list. With winter blasting in, chances are I won't ever mutter enough motivation to run outside at the break of dawn, so that should solve our early rise vs. night owl problem.

As for Mugg, he promised to go running with me once a week at night, in exchange for a late late night of guitar hero and cuddling in the next morning. There are still much conflict of interest we have to work on, but I'm glad there's a compromise to be made.

I can't wait for November.

Another thing I love about the Wonderland Trail, how the road is long but definite. I only have to put one step at a time after the next, and after days and nights we will eventually reach the finish line (assuming maps are good and bears are full). The road of life, in the past 22 years, has been similar - long but definite: by high school I know I will go to college, by college I know I need internships and jobs. But now, supposedly well-equipped ex-post 22 times 365 times 24 times 3600 times infinite moments of wisdom, the road suddenly erupts into, in my mind, a convergence of land, water and sky. Or, in boring words, a convergence of possibilities. I could do pretty much anything now, unconstraint, free spirited (that was always the goal anyway, no?) Few thoughts that have entered my mind include (a) law school - that's a big yes yes but "a good time" for it is still ambiguous; (b) development studies program in Sweden - now that's enticing; (c) joining a dance troop and samba my way through rio - hmm nope, just a dream, I detest those carnival outfits.

By default of course I could stay at NERA, move up along the ladder and work the system. Funny enough, in the much warned cold corporate world, I've found warmth and love tugged in backup books, court briefs and the very impersonal, un-private white cubicles. And I'd like to think that my presence has made work a bit more tolerable for Mugg, Boss Charming, Esther, Craig, Jay, big Trang, as they have completely colored my world. So there is hope after all, of human interaction rising above silly quabble of stock frauds and messy hedge fund transactions. Like the dementor, I live for that, hunting restlessly for leftover hope in gloomy New York.

One sunny day in September, as we were visiting Berkeley, Mugg gasped at the revelation that I could not do a cartwheel. He promptly took off his shoes, dragged me to a stretch of green grass in front of Bloat Hall (the law school!) and tried desperately to flip my hips over my head. It turned out, I had no balance whatsoever, and could not sustain my body inversion for as little as a split second in the air. We had a grand time nonetheless, and I'd never felt more free spirited despite the fact that I was doing nothing more than hurting my butt.

So I guess the next step is exactly what it is, a tiny little inch, some time unrecognizable.

The last few days before vacation are long. Way too long. As Mugg has been kept in the office everyday past midnight for the last two weeks, I was appointed Chief of Packing and Investigator of Missing Items. The progress was good - yesterday I felt particularly productive between listening to Michelle Obama and packing up my sweet little Maven. To my dismay, the backpack is indeed too small, and definitely won't fit the giant synthetic sleeping bag a coworker had kindly dropped off at my cube. I will need to go back to Tent and Trails to exchange for a bigger size or return it. Good thing I still have Alex's backpack as a backup. But man, how I'm gonna miss those hip belts. Michelle Obama, on the other hand, was fantastic.

Mugg is justly the Chief if Misplacing Items. As if affected by a spell, two things can never match up in his apartment: socks always get their partners confused, and gloves strive in vain to find their better half. Well, I had to admit I played an active role in the chaos. In the last few weeks, I was often distracted by superb jumps and twist of gymnastics and other Olympics events while folding laundry, thus giving my share in mixing up socks. Next thing on our Sherlock Holmes list is a right hand winter glove, a must item for the chilly nights of Mount Rainier.

Jay called few nights ago and asked if I want to volunteer for the Talk For Obama campaign. A coworker at NERA and law school candidate, Jay took 3 months off to campaign for Obama in North Dakota. As he was outgoing and an avid bar hopper, I was curious to see how Jay coped with the god-forsaken midwest town. Apparently the campaign has worked him breathless. While there isn't many bars around, Jay has been well-entertained with tall blond girls in this German-Swedish settlement region. lol Good for him. About Talk for Obama, I enthusiastically agreed. After vacation, Jay will pass along to me a list of potential voters in North Dakota to whom I need to call and persuade them to vote for Barack. In preparation, Yuko promptly lend me her "Dream from My Father" so I could marginally be familiar with the man. Exciting stuffs!

Three more days till the big trip!

Lately, as Mugg - in the most exaggerated and ungraceful manner - pointed out, I had a tendency to shuffle up my English vocabulary. In shock I discovered that things I thought my whole life are A turn out to be B. It all started one casual weekend when we decided to make salmon chili, a recipe passed down by his ultra-health-conscious friend from school. I volunteered to get grocery, among which were scallions. Mugg's face turned stone when I showed up with pinkish tiny onions, "These are shallots, you know that, right?" We raced to Wikipedia, and to Mugg's amusement I sunk into a state of temporary disbelief, as if my childhood had just been robbed by the discovery that Santa Claus were fictional. "It's okay" he consoled as I kept knocking my head an hour later, "You are not native." To which I pouted indignantly, "I used to win spelling bees during a class full of American kids!" Obviously a spelling bee trophy can hardly justify my messed up English skills, but since I am a girl and I just lost my bet over tiny onions, Mugg chuckled and offered to clean the dishes.

To my horror, I soon discovered in subsequent weeks that the matter of shallots vs. scallions wasn't the only leak in my memory pipe. Yams turn out to be not sweet potatoes; people travel on a subway, not in; "If I was" is as acceptable as "if I were"; and a flurry of nuances that I thought I had mastered.

I soon develop a habit to make Mariam Webster my best buddy. Like now, just 5 minutes ago, before putting down the title of this blog as "cramp" I cautiously performed a quick check to find out that cramp (v) as in a tension in muscles is very different than cram (v) as in studying really hard for an exam. That, by the way, is what I mean to write in this blog: I am cramming real hard for my CFA.

Honestly - reeeeal hard.

One morning, I woke up and looked outside the window: sun rays had generously poured over the head of the Statue of Liberty, and the winding tourist line in front of Battery Park was especially long. Light green buds had, from nowhere, crowded on otherwise bare branches. Spring was here.

A few years ago, during a cold bleak winter night in the Bates library, Saif and I mused over the many recent break-ups of out friends and commented on how hearts grew cold due to icy weather. But, when spring came, we optimisted, the hearts would soon become warm and toasty.

Spring 2008 - I snuggled at Mugg's warm and toasty heart as we strolled down Seventh Ave, happily away from the office earlier than usual on a Friday night. We had talked the night before about "life correlation", a statistic concept based on the correlation coefficient we looked at on daily basis at NERA. "My life is correlated to your mouth. When your mouth goes down my happiness goes down, when it goes up my happiness goes up," he said grimly, pulling the two corners of my mouth down and up into a frown and a smile.

I had laughed brightly at such silly thinking, but was deeply touched and amused. "So it was a good thing, then, that our life correlation coefficient is positive. And statistically significantly different than zero."

And I thus felt my own warm and toasty heart.

It all started with Oasis' Wonderwall, which Itunes menacingly or unconsciously put on repeat mode, and I too disconcerted to resist.

Or it could be an hour and a half of sweaty samba, followed by another hour and a half of roasting and suffocating in hot yoga.

Whatever it was, by the time I got home at 11pm, downed a full glass of orange juice and walked around my room for the nth time, the phone rang. "So, are you gonna tell me?" Mugg sounded suppress-ingly excited. "No, don't worry about it, it's not important" I resorted to passive offensive technique. "Come on!" he insisted on for five more minutes, but gave up with a giant arrgh as I refused to bulge. "Fine. Bye then."

By midnight, after one more dose of Wonderwall, I resolved to pick up the phone, "Let's meet." "Now??" Mugg was a little shocked - I learned later that a giant basketball game was on TV then. "Hello?" "Yeah yeah, now" - I must have knocked my head till silly during the 3o-second conversation.

We walked around Union Square in silence for half an hour, then talked till 4am in Starbucks.

It all started one cold, cold night :-)