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Thursday May 18, 2006

So I have definitely stopped updating this on a daily basis, but at Jenny’s urging, I’ll give it another shot.  Perhaps my entries will be a little more different, given the different mindset I have as I approach Xanga.  It’s not necessarily a summary of what I did during the day, but maybe some of the deeper questions I ponder over the course of several days or weeks.  Yeah, I do have deep thoughts.

So to begin, I’ve been doing a lot of work coordinating the second Asian American Community Training (ACT) program.  It’s a collarborate effort between Stanford and Berkeley students in putting on a three day training for Bay Area Asian American college activists.  The work has taken awhile, since we started meeting in August, but it’s been extremely rewarding and I’m sure training itself, which will happen Memorial Day weekened, will be a testament to our hard work.  At that time I hope we’ll really see the produce of our work be passed onto students around the Bay Area and that they’ll take what they learned and apply it to organizing students on and off campus towards making the world a better place to live.

Lately I’ve thought about how Andrea probed me about what community I had in St. Louis - I said I felt like I didn’t have one, and in the context of ACT and being at Stanford, I think a lot has changed.  There is no Asian American community in St. Louis and coming to Stanford has introduced me to one and I guess I’ve finally found my community and one where I am comfortable but also able to push myself towards being an activist (at times) or someone invested in researching and writing about my community’s history.  I guess this explains why I’m not too thrilled to come back to St. Louis - there’s friends and family, but there’s no community and that’s what I miss.  It’s not to say that I don’t like my St. Louis friends, but I suppose that’s how people change when they go to college.  It’s just what happens…

I can’t say classes have been going so well this quarter.  I’m taking 20 units and it’s been pretty stressful and I’ve been zoning out of most of my classes.  Filipino Experience is probably my worst class to sit through because it’s at 9am and there’s a particular person in the class who just talks about her boyfriend, being Filipina, and never engages in the reading.  It really turns turns me off from participating.

In the past few days I’ve had two meetings concerning In-House draws for SRC and Lantana.  In both I’ve got to say that I’m quite excited about being an RA and more excited to have my own single!  When I zone out I usually think about how I want to decorate my room - I definitely want to have better lighting and an air conditioner, especially for this summer.

Well that’s about it for now.  Hopefully I’ll have enough discipline to write something tomorrow night.