So I scribbled something...
I'm a moody person. Always have been. At one second, my heart feels like the sun is shining brightly outside and the magnolias are starting to peek outside of their ensconced velvety buds. A mere minutes after --- an email, a Canvas notification, an impossibly long line at my favorite campus coffee place, or even nothing --- my mood matches exactly with the eternally grey Vancouver sky. On top of that, there is always something looming at the horizon, such as an upcoming midterm or a group presentation to worry about. As soon as I finish a task, three others appear on my calendar app, keeping me tossing and turning at night. Then the next morning, one of my friends from high school or UBC taking transit with me could see me half-asleep walking across the street to reach the SkyTrain station, with a tiny Hong Kong milk tea on hand that would make my heart rate skyrocket in the next hour. Only another year to go!
Much to my agony, I had five classes again this term, with all of my days starting at 9:30 AM. Two of which, Psychology and Physiology, were continuing off last term's materials as 6-credit courses, so it consoled me a bit as I could still see many of my friends again. I started each week with a course about the evolution of human cognition. An early morning class discussion on early human skulls does sound initially discouraging, but I slowly found the fun with the historical sides, albeit a few hundreds of thousands years too early from my interested epochs. I also started a new course, Pathology, which really intrigued me as we learned about diseases. Even though I was half-asleep for most of the lectures, the prof's endless energy (shown by constantly running up and down all the way to the nosebleed sections of the lecture halls) kept the class engaged. Another new field that I learned this term was forestry, which I knew next to nothing before coming into the class. Therefore, I was pleasantly surprised that the class also focused a lot on the history and cultures of Indigenous people worldwide. Rambling about the Treaty of Tordisillas in my assignments was a fresh breath from my other heavily scientific classes - something to make up for having to drop Portuguese this term to meet my other science requirements. As they say, when there's a will, there's a way :)
But sometimes, you have to look at the bright side of life. Between the classes, I would study inside the Woodward Library, where I can gaze outside the trees. As the days got longer, I could see the buds from the magnolia trees outside the window, their silky white petals slowly blooming wide like sky lanterns. This year's Lunar New Year fell right on one of my days off during reading break, with the sky an unusual crisp blue. I turned off my laptop, put on my áo dài, and braved the freezing winds to visit the nearby Buddhist temple and join the prayers. It was still early in the morning, but I could already see rows of cars parking along the street, with families heading to the stairs to reach the main altar, where reside the Buddha statues. The musky scent of burning incense flowing with the streams of smokes woven like gossamer calmed down visitors coming with the most hectic lives. After our visit, we went around the temple's garden, where each neatly trimmed plant and flower beds was adorned with New Year decorations in red and yellow. Even for a brief moment, I feel like home isn't that far away.
I love sidequesting, sometimes a little too hard. In the midst of being snowed under midterms and assignments, on a random Monday, my family travelled down south Point Roberts for some business. The epitome of a Pacific Northwest Sleepy Hollow, this exclave of the U.S. is an extension of the Tsawwassen Peninsula, geographically isolated from the U.S. mainland. As an unprecedented result of the 1846 Oregon Treaty, which assigned the upper side of 49th latitude belonging to Canada (then a British colony) and the lower side to the U.S., this tiny end of the peninsula just below Delta is in American jurisdiction. But history aside, this sleepy place has its own quaint charms that remind me of Charlottetown nearly a decade ago. There is only one main road (Tyee Drive) going down from the U.S.-Canada border to the end of Point Roberts, where there is a lighthouse park and a small marina with more yatches than all the cars in this place combined. In early spring, daffodils near the rusty Can-Am gas station sway their yellow crowns with the salty breezes, while wild cherry blossom trees bloom like giant cotton candies alongside the creeks. The entire community only has one coffee shop, which closes at 4 PM on a good day but offers the most heavenly cinnamon buns. But what fascinated me the most was the endearing manners of the residents, from the lady at the deli counter telling me "I better see you at the park!" on a sunny afternoon to the sweet grannie at the gas station calling everyone 'honey.' Life is so much more than sitting in an overheated lecture :D
And then the days passed, without me even stopping to realize. Barely two weeks ago, I completed my last exam in third year (5 exams in 3 days did do something to the last of my wits). And now I'm back to typing on this scrambled blog when not re-reading the chapters of Sherlock Holmes that I haven't returned to since the summer before grade 9. Little did I realize how I miss reading, the sheer joys of flipping the pages to follow the adventures of Holmes and Watson from the winding alleys of foggy London to the pastoral countrysides up north. When my eyes start to yearn for some time away from reading, I took the bus to get a sublime iced caramel macchiato in some overlit coffee shop, jamming to Gustavo Cerati's enigmatic songs (¡que viva el rock en español!) all over again. Outside, the sun is shining brightly, the first time in so long that there is no rain for more than a week - and I feel so light.
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