Merry Christmas everyone! And remember, amidst all the shopping and gifts, let us not forget that it is Jesus' birthday. Yay! I know I am thankful for all the things I have in my life, all thanks to the grace of the Lord. I am looking forward to the great things to come in the future. On a lesser note, I finally installed Diablo II on my laptop (I borrowed this last year to play, but my ancient pre-pentium computer could not handle it). I can really see how this game can be addicting. However, I get stressed out playing this. I think I would do better if I weren't doing it alone. OK. I should go to bed so I can wake up in time tomorrow to go to my grandma's house to celebrate Christmas there.

Wowie, two posts in a row. I love vacation. I am truly truly a human vegetable. I mean, I get to talk to my friends....laugh, smile, eat. Listen to music, play music...gosh. All these things...*sigh*. Freedom is sooo precious. You don't know how good it feels. I love having time to just truly enjoy myself. I made the great Monica Nguyen a blog journal today. Hehe. No doubt she will enjoy writing in that, given her lengthy IM's....which are of course well appreciated. Well, I haven't got much to say, so I will cut it short.

It always seems like I only post blogs at ungodly hours when I should be sleeping, but for one reason or another am not. Well, I think the order of my finances has kept me up. I just recently received a statement for my credit card that I haven't used since July. It's now December. I wonder who the hell got a hold of my credit card information. I should sue for credit fraud. But anyway, I have shut down that account and so will not have to worry about any more unauthorized charges on that card. However, I still have to speak with the billing department about the whole business to see if I should not pay for this fraud. It's not a terribly large sum of money, but it still irks me that I will have to pay for someone else who I probably (at least I would hope) don't know.

Anyhow, I just went through my first quarter in dental school. I must say that it was much more challenging than I had ever anticipated. I guess UCI was too easy on me. I forget what hard work really is like. I can't take this stuff lightly...haha. I got my butt whooped. With that said, I think I must be much more dilligent in my work next quarter. Let's just hope I passed all my classes. The only class I'm truly concerned about is actually biochem. Let's just say there was a lot of guess work that went into that test. *sigh* Not a good feeling at all. Sometimes I wonder what kind of life lies ahead of me. I mean, the things that really move us are things of beauty, or the lack thereof. Dissonance is a great eye opener. Life sometimes seems like an endless drone of the pursuit of beauty, perfection, etc. When you feel like you have those things in your hands, you then begin to question whether or not that was what you wanted in the first place. Some of us like to set lofty goals that we know we'll never achieve, just as a motivator to keep us moving forward. A part of me understands why. I mean, once you're at the top of a mountain, the only place you've got left to go is down, right? ...

I always say that if I were so and so, I would die happy. But I know that's not true. Life does not culminate in a single event or acquisition. The people that are constantly in flux in my life are at times breathtaking. A lesson can always be taken from the people that cross your path, sometimes in ways you could never ever have imagined. Maybe you perceived a certain someone in one light one day, and in a moment see him/her in a totally different light. Maybe someone will make you look at the world differently, not by way of a philosophical debate, but by example or simply being. Maybe another person taught you about love or hurt, the capacity of your emotions, thereby bringing about the realization of what it is to be human in ways the walls of your imagination never would have permitted before. The people who can knock down those walls...are rare and few. These people may be so rare, in fact, that not everyone will have the benefit of meeting one ever. I think that while a certain degree of insanity is encountered when the walls are being pummelled to the ground (a la allegory of the den), everyone benefits from the revelation of extent of human emotion. We're all complex beings, way too complex to analyze...despite society's recent attempts to attribute EVERYTHING about people to some sort of "gene". Sometimes people's lack of understanding of genetics is rather humoring. Haha. Everything is subjective. Everything is about politics. No art or science is untainted by politics, sadly. Those few people in the world I know who are pure of heart get stomped on. Disgusting. Sounding cynical, am I? Naw, I just call it the way I see it. Well, all of us have the right to retreat to an untainted world where we can all embrace the ever so perfect facets of our being...even if that world exists only in one's mind.