Where I Need to Be

The song that best sums up life at the moment (now THAT's a bold statement). Listen and love it.

Home for the Holidays

Christmastime and the holidays are the best time of year to write. There’s something about the combination of cold weather, family and those cheesy Christmas commercials that feeds directly into my urge to blog, har har. After what has been one of the most stressful, ridiculous semesters of college thus far, I’m savoring home-cooked meals, hours-long catchup sessions, and best of all, sleeping in. It saddens me to know, however, that break is going by so quickly – it’s already been a week since I’ve been home. Time really needs to slow the heck down, because this is pretty much the last “official” winter break of uh…life. Fo serious.

Winter breaks have changed so much from what they used to be back in the day. I still remember celebrating the holiday season in elementary school – performing dances, songs and other shenanigans with the rest of the class for the school’s annual Christmas concert. Even high school had its winter band and choir concerts. It was embarrassing then, and would probably be embarrassing now, but having those traditions really got everyone into the holiday spirit, and I do miss having solid benchmark events like that throughout the year.

I think I even miss ugly Christmas sweaters, not gonna lie.

The family and I used to be big on the multi-family holiday get-togethers – you know, the ones with lots of food (read: rice), fruit (read: sliced Asian pears) and frenzy (read: a chance for the parents to gossip and reminisce, also an excuse for them to throw their kids together and learn to deal with awkward social situations). There were potlucks in San Marino, karaoke nights at relatives’ houses, gift exchanges and Christmas feasts at an ever-changing array of homes.

Christmas music, lighted tree, TV blaring.

Kids’ tables, apple cider, intense Nintendo and board game sessions.

It was a great way to grow up, and over the years, these family friends became part of the holiday routine. Since we only saw each other once a year, there was always something to catch up on, some new news to share, a random story to tell. It was comforting to see these families parallel my own, and in a lot of ways, act as projected representations of what was to come.

I remember when the first of the “kids” stopped showing up to our holiday dinners – he went away to college, then graduated, then started his first job. It was jarring to know that such huge life changes were happening to people we had grown up with. We had all gone from sharing toys and candy to talking about boys and the latest video games to swapping college and career advice. Parents started to move away after their kids moved out. The gatherings became more infrequent as each family got more wrapped up in their own holiday plans.

It was surreal and we almost didn’t see it coming, but apparently, we were all growing up.

Then, someone got married. It wasn’t just my imagination then. Life really was speeding by, and the days of careless candy wrappers and shoes piled high in the foyer were over.

Just.

Like.

That.

Nowadays, the holidays are spent with our own immediate families, and I kind of like it that way, though it took a while to embrace this new holiday tradition. It’s a lot quieter without hoards of children running up and down stairs and parents yakking away around a half-cleared dinner table, and the lack of Christmas chaos feels a bit empty sometimes.

But at the same time, even though I miss the kind of winter break we shared growing up, I couldn’t ask for a better one than the one I’ve been having so far this year. It’s rare for the four of us in our immediate family to be in the same place at the same time anymore, and that’s what makes this holiday season so much more poignant.

My parents are always going between the States and Taiwan to visit my grandparents and take care of family business there. My brother’s starting a new job in January. I’ll be graduating in May, and moving to New York (fingers crossed). Who knows how the family dynamic will shift again then?

Kind of makes me think of one of my favourite quotes, however cheesy it might be:

“You'll see when you move out, it just sort of happens one day. One day and it's just gone. And you can never get it back. It's like you get homesick for a place that doesn't exist. I mean it's like this rite of passage, you know. You won't have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it's like a cycle or something. I miss the idea of it. Maybe that's all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place.”

…except I know what I miss is real.

This holiday season, I’m savoring break for what it’s worth because seriously, for the first time in the four years since I first moved out, I feel like I’m home again.

LOVE.

I think my friends are some of the most amazing people I have ever met. Just thought I'd throw that out there. Must elaborate later.

Home stretch

"The fact is, that to do anything in the world worth doing, we must not stand back shivering and thinking of the cold and danger, but jump in and scramble through as well as we can."

- Robert Cushing

Inspiration for this very last part of the semester - three stories to revise and you can stick a fork in me because I'll be DONE.

...diving right back in...

Had to write a final paper on happiness for a science of happiness class this semester. This is the result, honestly the worst piece of BS I have ever had the horror of presenting to a professor. Thought I'd post it here, though, because it's a lesson to be learned - don't write papers while half cracked-out or on serious deadline. Yikes.

"The truth about happiness is that there is nothing to pursue. The pursuit of happiness is often seen as something that stems from monetary gain or material wealth - external factors. However, this misperception about reaching a certain level of happiness exists because people believe that attaining both those things will automatically bring about true happiness because of the value of the tangible things themselves. The truth is that securing one or both of those elements, if even in the most basic of ways, brings happiness because it ensures a type of stable foundation upon which happiness can be built. Money and possessions as external factors do not affect the type of happiness that we as a society strive to achieve - this has been proven time and time again by the poor body, rich-souled individual ad the unhappy, extravagantly rich socialite. Intangible elements of life - love, compassion, gratitude - that come from within are the things that define and make up the actual "happiness" that everyone seeks. Happiness is an intrinsic element o the human condition, and can be defined as the point at which internal satisfaction meets external social awareness. It is linked to knowing ourselves, being able to envision our place within a societal structure, and seeing just how we can contribute to the bigger picture.

True happiness, then, the kind that sticks around longer than simple transient positive feelings, can be defined as a judgment, an internal decision made by an individual regarding his or her attitude in a given situation. As stated in William Shakespeare's famous play Hamlet, and as quoted in Dr. Monterosso's lecture, "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Happiness is founded largely on attitude. It is not a certain set o circumstances that determines happiness, but a certain set o attitudes that makes it possible for some people to take their inherent happiness set point and fluctuate on the positive end of it as opposed to the negative end of it. Given that a large part of a person's innate happiness is determined by genetics, as proven in the Minnesota Twins study, the only way to truly reach a level of happiness that is long-lasting, genetics aside, is to adopt a certain attitude toward the circumstances he or she is presented with.

Whether imagined or not, a person's ability to have control over their lives - including the choice to stress or not in a given situation - plays a large role in determining his or her overall happiness level, and this is perhaps best illustrated by the nursing home study. In this study, Adam Galinsky, a professor at Northwestern University, gave a group of senior citizens in a nursing home a plant to care for, and a control group nothing to care for. It was found that the group that had the plants to care for tended to live longer, happier lives than those who didn't, mostly because they felt that they had an element of control over their plants. They therefore felt more purpose in their lives and the psychological state of control - of being able to choose their attitudes - translated into a physical ability to live a longer, richer life.

A person's attributional style is perhaps the biggest determining factor in how happy a person can be said to be - someone who blames himself when things go awry and assumes that the negative circumstances are permanent rather than temporary is more likely to spiral into a pattern o unhappiness than someone who is able to see the situation in the big picture and acknowledge how realistically temporary and negative circumstances are. In a study by Seligman and Maier, two groups of do were left in harnesses for a period of time and then given electric shocks at different intervals. One groups was given a lever to press that would stop the shocks, and another group had levers that did nothing to stop the electric shocks. Dogs from the second group developed something known as "learned helplessness" - that is, that nothing they could do would change the situation that they were in. As a result, these dogs would refuse to try anything to stop their pain, showing signs of what can best be described as an equivalent to human clinical depression. Translated into human-relatable terms, this shows that people who adopt the attitude of learned helplessness do not bother to venture to either know themselves or establish relationships with other people and therefore are a cause of their own unhappiness.

In order to structure a life wherein happiness is a constant, then, it is necessary for individuals to build upon their own internal satisfaction and extend that into interpersonal relations with others. It is without a doubt that social connectivity contributes largely to the happiness level of individuals. Studies have proven that the greater the number of social networks a person has, the more likely he or she is to have a higher life satisfaction rating. Being with other people, whether in a companionship or romantic sense, helps to establish a person's sense of self and gives him or her a bigger opportunity to take on social responsibility that might impact his or her own happiness in addition to helping the other party, and this is how happiness is nurtured and sustained. Intangible life assets, such as forgiveness, generosity and gratitude all tie into individuals' overall happiness.

The difference between animals and human beings is their capacity to have a multi-layered happiness that is independent of external factors. For dogs or pigs, as John Stuart Mills pointed out, happiness is contingent on ignorance, and the general consensus is that it is better to be a dissatisfied human being than to be a satisfied animal. Our ability to think about our actions and e a player in our own lives is what sets us apart and what makes our lives richer and happier."