Thoughts

“My Dear Wormwood…”

“… The Enemy allows this disappointment to occur on the threshold of every human endeavor. It occurs when the boy who has been enchanted in the nursery by Stories from the Odyssey buckles down to really learning Greek. It occurs when lovers have got married and begin the real task of learning to live together. In every department of life it marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing. The Enemy takes this risk because He has a curious fantasy of making all these disgusting little human vermin into what He calls His ‘free’ lovers and servants—‘sons’ is the word He uses, with His inveterate love of degrading the whole spiritual world by unnatural liaisons with the two-legged animals. Desiring their freedom, He therefore refuses to carry them, by their mere affections and habits, to any of the goals which He sets before them: He leaves them to ‘do it on their own.’ And there lies our opportunity. But also, remember, thre lies our danger. If once they get through this initial dryness successfully, they become much less dependent on emotion and therefore much harder to tempt…”

Your affectionate uncle

Screwtape

(C.S. Lewis)

Edit:

Edit to “Huskiness”

I’m beautiful because I was created in my Creator’s image. 

Thanks to Minah for that reminder (hope you’ve been well, old SG leader)

Huskiness

Husky. It’s not usually the most flattering adjective to describe a woman, but I’ll just go ahead and say for myself: I am one husky girl. I think I get it from my dad. You know those big Incredible Hulk fists that they sell in the toy section of Target? I swear, those are exact replicas of my dad’s fists. If my dad were to punch you in the chest, I’m pretty sure that the impact would cause an aortic rupture. Or something like that. 

I remember when I was a little kid, I wanted to be really strong just like my dad. I’d go to the Y every so often and try to build upper body strength by using the exercise machines. When I was in 6th grade, my pride was the ability to pull 130 lbs on this one arm/shoulder machine. Dang, I was one powerful kid.

I liked it when people could see how strong I was for a girl. I guess it was the only physical characteristic that I could actually be proud of, since I was so utterly dissatisfied with everything else. Plus, whenever other kids made fun of me for being so fat, I could just reassure myself that I just had a lot of muscle underneath the fat, so I wasn’t really as fat as they thought I was… (lying to oneself repeatedly is an effective defense mechanism, trust me).

Throughout my middle and high school years, I owned up to this uniqueness contentedly in general… but it wasn’t until I got to college that I began to really dislike even my heftiness. I felt this way the moment I became aware of the stark contrast between myself and the other asian girls I saw around at Duke. So many of them are slender and petite… while I can make the entire bus shake when I get on it. Not only that, I expose my broad man-shoulders and big arms whenever I wear a dress. I began thinking, girls aren’t supposed to have lots of muscle or look so big…

Oh, another thing that I wondered a lot about: why do I feel like I’m the only asian girl with nappy hair??? They didn’t call me Ms. Frizzle for nothing!

Haha… anyway. That realization led to a lot of unhappiness for a long time, I think. It led to bitterness and intense jealousy of other girls; 1.5 months of eating 600 calories per day with rigorous exercise to lose 30 pounds; dwelling on self-pity for unreciprocated feelings, and my reasoning for that being, “it’s because I’m not pretty at all”… the stupid list goes on. 

It took some time this summer to really clear my head and to repent of everything bad that I had done to myself and to others over the past two years. I had taken all of the bitterness and coveting and selfish desires built up inside of me, and made myself completely ugly. I longed so much for beauty, but I made myself hideous inside and out instead… truly ironic, isn’t it?

***

This is a constantly changing world, with different fads and trends and ideas always coming and going… but I have the feeling that the societal concept of “beauty” will never be redefined in my favor. But that doesn’t matter now. Now, I know that I’m truly beautiful, no matter how anyone else perceives me or how I look compared to other girls. I had Someone Else define beauty for me.

And, I’m glad to finally say that I’m proud of being husky again. I’m so much more helpful this way. A couple of weeks ago, our family moved to a different neighborhood. It felt good lifting heavy furniture and carrying big boxes alongside my older brother and dad; I was able to share the load with them more evenly. Through this I realize that I was designed this way- every single aspect makes up who I am, and I’ve been created beautifully. Also, I know my strengths (literally and figuratively) will each serve some purpose throughout my lifetime. Maybe I’ll use my strong arms to carry medical supplies to a remote village in the mountains as a medical missionary, while my big nappy hair traps in all the body heat to keep my head nice and warm- haha, only God knows.

On Second Thought

As I said before, listening to “La Vie Boheme” gets me in a good mood, despite some of the content. But it’s interesting… in today’s sermon, the pastor happened to talk about possible dangers of culture and its ability to infiltrate our minds and hearts with things that we wouldn’t even think about going near on our own. I don’t want to say that the “rigidity of religion” is the “culprit” for stopping me from enjoying and admiring certain arts, but what he said got me reevaluating what I wrote in my last entry, and then some.

Let’s take for example… The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which I also mentioned last night. This show is a pretty big deal in our society. According to Wikipedia, “the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being ‘culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.’ ” Cool! That, along with the one song from Rocky Horror that I know so far- you guessed it- Time Warp, really made me want to see it. But all things musically and aesthetically enriching aside, what would I really be watching? Well I couldn’t help but read through the plot on Wikipedia, and… oh… wow. :/ Maybe I shouldn’t watch it, after all. 

… But it’s culturally significant! Why shouldn’t I watch it? I’d watch it for the music and the beauty of performing arts, right? And it’s been so successful in the box office for a reason, right?

Hm, culture. The collection of what our society admires, values and gets joy out of. Art, music, ways of life and practices, goals, inspirations, beliefs, values. There are just so many different facets and parts to American culture. I think that I speak for us all when I say that we choose and pick different things from what we see around us and make them our own-we personalize them. We choose different looks and interests, and use them to somehow individualize ourselves and to grow into who we want to be. After all, a society like ours admires uniqueness and distinction.

And you know what? That works. We associate different things with certain attitudes or sentiments and ideas. We think, ” That girl is obsessed with Twilight so she must be _____.” Or, “ooh, he likes Jack’s Mannequin and Keane, so he’s probably ___.” We associate all the time. By the way, I like quite a few Backstreet Boys songs, I think Zac Efron was pretty good in “17 Again,” and I think that the Party Rock Shuffle is such a cool dance. Also, I hate big purses and wearing dresses. That probably means that I’m ____.” Infer all you want.

But more often than not, it seems that instead of defining ourselves using culture, culture swallows us up and makes us lose sight of who we originally are. I think I’m there now. I love musicals, but I’m not usually the type to look forward to seeing a show in which a “sweet transvestite” tricks people into having sex with him/her and kills people with ice axes and whatever. But until now I was willing to watch that anyway… now why is that again? Because everyone else said that it’s worth watching- that it’s one of the most essential musicals to ever see. Because Culture said so.

Now, I don’t want to overgeneralize. I’m not saying that just because someone likes something, he’ll like every single thing connected to that. But I think that culture can instill a certain propensity in us to immerse ourselves more and more into what we like, no matter whether it’s good or bad. I guess it’s just important for me to filter a lot of the stuff that I expose myself to and take interest in, and not lose my own values while exploring the world’s culture. But it’s hard sometimes, isn’t it?

I guess I should revise my Musicals list. I’ll take out Rocky Horror and rewatch either Sound of Music or Mary Poppins. I grew up with those movies. Does anyone have suggestions?

Enfermedad

It seems that quite a few people whom I know have been getting sick lately. For those who study in Perkins a lot… I understand why. It’s always so cold in the library. For those who unknowingly ate 3 day-old doughnuts… I understand that, too. =[

Although I hardly ever get sick (which I probably owe to my mild case of bacteriophobia, diligent hand-washing, and sufficient daily intake of vitamin C), I feel like I’ve been sick for a while, now. It’s not the runny nose/sore throat/feverish delirium kind of sick. It’s the lack of focus/frequent bouts of belting out powerfully emotional songs/”WHY OH WHYYYY” kind of sick. ____sick. You fill in the blank. 

There has to be a treatment or cure for everything… right? If one has AIDS, he is prescribed AZT/other NRTI drugs. If one has type I diabetes, he needs insulin injections. If one experiences best-TV-program-ever deprivation, he needs to watch LOST (which is basically everyone who hasn’t watched LOST yet). But for this ____sickness… it seems to me that the treatment varies from person to person… but is there a definite cure? Well, I’ve resorted to the “out of sight, out of mind” method, also known as “cowardliness for the sake of self-interest.” Or something like that. But as long as it makes me feel better… right? RIGHT? 

Well, then… that’s enough soul-bearing expository late-night blogging for now. Silly Grace, you should be studying for the biochem final on Thursday. 

But for real, on Thursday after I’m done with my exam, I am going to LoYo on Erwin Rd. to treat myself to original tart fro-yo with blueberries and mochi on top. For those of you who happen to read this blog/currently live in Durham/are free on Thursday to join me, please let me know! It’d be nice to see some people before I leave Duke for a while…