Posted 6:54 PM by Blah blah

New for My Reading List

New blog in The Asian Journalist, called Time of My Life, by H L. She's a Chinese Christian girl who recently moved from the East Coast to Silicon Valley! Since I'm also an East Coast transplant (from New England), I dig many of her funny and right-on-target observations, like:

Even though I've always worked in science/technology I think I'm actually much more of a humanities type of person. Recently someone asked me if I could do it all over would I have chosen to major in something fuzzy instead of a science. I still said no. I'm still too ingrained with the Asian mentality. But I lived in a world in which it would be "practical" to do so. I wish I lived in a parallel universe in which English and sociology majors are wooed and recruited out of school into start-ups where they get paid lots of money to write all day. Engineering would be for humanities drop-outs. They would get jobs answering the phones at these start-ups. Haha! Alas, the world is not that way. But still, maybe one day someone will pay me to blog.

- Some people here seem to be unaware that anything exists outside of California. Now while this is certainly an understandable misconception I was still pretty shocked when one girl asked me whether Delaware was close to Sacramento. Another person, when asked if she had grown up in the area, replied casually, "No, I grew up in Fremont." [H L, I still meet people who think my home of Rhode Island is somewhere in the Bahamas! People here think the world revolves around California.]

- This goes without saying, but there are SO many Asians. I don't think I ever realized what it was like not to be a minority until I came here. Not only that but there are a ton of Cantonese people here. When I was growing up my Mandarin friends always made fun of me for my peasant roots. "Har Gow! Siu Mai!" Here I don't have to explain that no, I don't eat dog. [Since I went to an elementary school in New England with only TWO Asians (including me), I thought I had come to this racial nirvana.]

- The cost of living here really is insane. Just because a house looks like it's made of sticks doesn't mean it's not a million dollars. I remember once as a community service activity my fellowship was collecting canned goods for a food drive. My team was assigned to a neighorhood in Cupertino. As I was walking around I was thinking that maybe we should be giving these people canned goods instead of soliciting them. Some of the houses looked like they were about to fall apart and one looked like someone had built it out of twigs. Imagine my shock when a guy on my team told me that houses in this neighborhood were still in the ballpark of a million dollars! [I'm laughing. My parents felt the same culture shock.]

So Diary of a Mad Monk: The Confessions of an Ex-Priest, by Dave, came back out of hiding last month! I must be the last to know. Will add him to my reading list. Here's what I wrote about him. Am feeling stretched and exhausted today. How are you doing?

Good to see that Tae Kim in NYC has a new look, password-free! Check him out. Hiya Tae!