Hotashi

For some reason I completely forgot of making some goals for this year. I remembered when I read Tiff’s blog. So here is my list.

Goals for 2008
1. Graduate >=D
2. Exercise for 10 minutes everyday.
3. Write e-mails & snail mails more often.
4. Eat less meat and more vegetables.
5. Avoid Walmart like the plague.

Sadly that is all that I can think of right now. There are a few things that I am looking forward to for 2008. Firstly I’m going to Ottawa at the end of January with some other grad students. It’s only for a weekend but I’m sure we will have a lot of fun.

There is also a good chance that my family will be going to India in June for my paternal grandmother’s 80th birthday. We’re hoping that all her children will come for her birthday and it will be the first reunion with all her kids there since…before I was born. o_O!!!

And lastly, I will (hopefully) graduate from my Masters program and will get an enjoyable job. Once that happens Jack and I can start planning our wedding. My family in India just started finding out about our engagement. It feels weird with them knowing it. It’s almost like…it’s REALLY official. It gives me chills.

That also reminds me, Jack’s and my family got together for our official family introduction. It went pretty well. There was a lot of talk about India and China *surprise surprise*. Both our parents seem to be very happy for us, which makes me happy. I’m so glad all of these social gatherings are over and done with. I can now concentrate on school for the next eight months in peace. =P

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Happy New Year everyone! I hope that 2008 will bring you joy and happiness, but most importantly, gratitude. No matter what our position is in life we always should thank God for the blessings we have. 2007 was a bitter-sweet year for me. There were a lot of hard moments, such as deaths close to me, having to say goodbye to my close friend Maki, and having to return to school for another year with different living conditions. But there were also many happy moments, like my engagement with Jack.

Speaking of our engagement, we had our engagement party this past Friday. It was a lot of fun and we had a good turnout. We had a lot more food than we were expecting so we had to eat a lot the following couple of days. For the most part it ran pretty smoothyl up until the end. The security guards didn’t tell us that we had to be out of the room by 10:45 so we were frantically trying to pack up everything and get out so they cound finish the inspection. My feet were killing me by the end of the night too. Other than those two things, I had a great time.

Well that’s all from me. Hopefully I will be able to blog more often in the next month. I shouldn’t be TOO busy. =P

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I went to the mall yesterday and bought a dress for our engagement party. I really like it, but to be honest I liked the first one better. I had picked out which dress I wanted and went place an order for my size on Sunday, but the manager said she wouldn’t order it for me because there were too many orders for that dress that came in damaged. The waistband isn’t wide enough so it ends up being wripped when people try it on. It was such a beautiful dress too. You would think that designers would check to see if their creations were practical. So many times I’ve attempted to try a shirt on and the neck doesn’t stretch enough to fit over my head. And I have a very small head! So stupid. Anyway, this is the dress I got. Sorry for the bad pics. I wasn’t patient enough to take a “fabulous” shot. These were good enough. =P

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My family is coming up to Waterloo tomorrow so that we can all go out for lunch. I’m really looking forward to it. When I was growing up, my family didn’t do things like this. The only time we went out to eat was randomly to McDonald’s, and that was usually because we were travelling and got hungry. They are also going to take me to the mall so that I can refill my printer cartridge and order a dress for Jack’s and my engagement party. I was planning on doing this yesterday, but it was Buy Nothing Day and I was determined not to buy anything. I am very proud of myself, especially since I was craving a bag of cheese puffs at work. Saved myself $1. =P

Speaking of work, we had an incident with a suspicious man. He had approached a young woman at Starbucks while she was purchasing something (no! it’s buy nothing day!), and he kept asking her for her number. After refusing and leaving the store he followed her to our work place (which is the campus recital hall) where there was a concert. I was working the at the concession stand. Before the concert and during intermission he made his rounds to all the ushers (who were all young women) and asked them if they had a boyfriend. He did this to me as well, which I didn’t think much of at the time since the conversation started out like just a friendly conversation. I was then approached by one of the ushers who was trying to warn me about how he has been asking the other ushers about their personal life, to which I told her he did the same to me. He was then asked to leave, which he did, but since nobody escorted him out we didn’t know if he really left the campus.

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I’ve been really emotional about a particular part of my life, and it stresses me out whenever I think about it. The stress is not from classes or class work, it’s not from being a TA, it’s not from giving lectures in front of a 200+ student class, it’s not from marking and remarking over 200 assignments, it’s not from my stupid roomates who have no common sense. All these things do stress me, but not that much…except maybe the stupid roommates. What I’ve been really, really angry about lately is the engagement.

Now it’s probably not what you think…or maybe it is…I can’t remember if I mentioned this in an earlier post. It’s not about Jack or the way he proposed or anything like that. It’s our parents. They don’t care about our engagement. For the most part, they don’t even acknowledge any change whatsoever. They didn’t even congratulate us.

This really angers me. To me, it is just decent to congratulate someone when they get engaged. Period. Not doing so either makes the couple feel guilty for getting engaged (which is not the case here), or makes those who do not wish them look like complete [enter a not-so-nice word here]. It is rude. All these emtotions really made our engagement suck. When I think about it now I don’t think about how Jack proposed, or how happy we were or how excited our friends got when they found out. What I think about is the ‘whatever’ attitude my mother had when I told her (which was right after we got engaged…I called her on the phone), or the ‘whatever’ attitude Jack’s parents had when we went over the day after and they ignored us for the most part. My feelings of anger and hurt make me wish we didn’t get engaged, because I can’t even think about all the great things about it. All I think about is how ill-mannered our parents are. And these feelings aren’t helping me when school is stressful enough.

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