On the Edge

Do you ever feel like you're on the edge of something great? Of becoming someone who makes a difference? Of finding something you're truly passionate about that will also inspire passion in others? That's kind of what I feel like right now. I feel like I could be someone extraordinary, and I just have to figure out why and how. There's something or someone inside me, waiting to be discovered, and I just have to be brave enough to go looking for her. It's a little scary though, heading into uncharted waters. There's no telling where I might end up or what dangers, disappointments, betrayals, and losses I might face, or what I might be called upon to sacrifice. Am I willing to give up what I have for a chance to get what I want? Who am I, really?

I guess the only way to find out is to move forward, one step at a time, and always ask myself at each new stage: is this who I want to be? am I on the right track? would God be proud of what I've done? am I proud of what I've done?

VLOG!

I made a vlog. You should watch it! It's about Stonehenge and the Roman Baths. :) Enjoy!

You are More than Your Facebook Page

A while ago, for my Creative Non-Fiction class, I read the article "Generation Why?" by Zadie Smith, a youngish black British female writer. It was both a creative essay and a review of the film "The Social Network" and it totally summarized all the feelings I have been feeling about Facebook. I got my Facebook page way back in high school, after everyone else had already gotten one and was always asking me "Hey, do you have a Facebook page?" I was kind of slow, in terms of being "internet savvy" or whatever. I think I'd actually just gotten a Myspace page a little while before Facebook exploded all over the place. That's how out of touch I was. But I digress. So, I got my Facebook page and started friending everyone and anyone I knew even remotely. It was all a competition to see who had the most friends. And it was alright for a while. I thought it was pretty useful to keep track of my family back in Seattle and also see what was going on in the lives of my classmates and whoever. But then I went to college. I got wiser about who were my Facebook friends and who were my real friends. Cue my first friend purge. And later, my second. Sure, sure Facebook was still kinda fun and what not. Games and things, comment wars, chatting. But its charm was wearing off. And then I read this article. You can read it here: Generation Why? by Zadie Smith

To summarize it's main points:

• The real Mark Zuckerberg is nothing like the Jesse Eisenberg version. Of course the screenwriters spiced him up with witty one-liners and what not. The real Mark Zuckerberg is quite boring, actually. He seeks the "elimination of desire." (A quote from one of his interviews.)
• The internet "underrepresents reality." (from Jaron Lanier's "You are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto") On Facebook, all you are is boiled down to a series of likes and dislikes. Human beings are complex, confusing creatures that can't possibly be summed up in a bunch of random little facts.
• Facebook forces people to perform. It's all a big contest in who can get the most friends, who has the most pictures tagged of them, whose status gets the most likes. If a person's Facebook page doesn't have a lot of pictures or updates on it, people usually assume it's because that person has no life or is really boring.
• It allows people to do the very barest minimum in actual communication. And in some cases, people are starting to replace ACTUAL HUMAN INTERACTION with Facebook. (OMG He liked my status? HE'S TTLY IN LURV W/MEH!)

I would really just like to add to these arguments that I think Facebook is a poor replacement for real life. I'm not saying that I'll delete my Facebook or that anyone who uses it is wrong or an idiot or whatever. In terms of businesses and media and all that stuff, Facebook is great because it allows them to get in touch with all sorts of customers and push their products on people. I'm just saying that, eventually, I hope that Facebook goes away. It is killing the English language. It's making people more and more socially inept. And everyone should know that you are more than just your Facebook page. Go out and BE SOMEONE, and then share it with all your friends. Your REAL friends. Because, honestly, if you really wanted to be friends with all the people on your friends list, you'd call them up and talk to them, or do stuff with them.

That's all.

Peace out.

My New Hobby

Parkour: getting from Point A to Point B in the most efficient, quickest, but still safe way possible.
Free-running: like parkour, but with more flips and acrobatics and not so focused on the "efficiency" part.

So I went to my first parkour class last week and BOY HOWDY was it tiring! It was probably the most intense workout of my life. I don't know if you have figured it out yet, but I am definitely NOT a regular exerciser. The most exercise I've gotten since I arrived in London is probably lugging my groceries four blocks home. But then of course I figured out a bus route that cut that distance to half a block, and there went my exercise. haha.

However, for the longest time, I have been really interested in parkour. When I saw my first clip of "Urban Ninja" on Youtube, I freaked out. 'I CAN BE A REAL LIFE NINJA!!!' People were flipping off the roofs of buildings, scrambling up walls, climbing fences, jumping over railings. I know it's a little bit racist, but I thought 'I'm Asian, so I have to be able to do this.'

Well, I am proud to say that I have, and it is awesome. It took me about 45 minutes to commute to the gym where class was held. I was going all by my lonesome and was afraid that I would get lost, but luckily for me, the gym was actually within sight of the tube stop. Yay! I was actually really early, and class didn't start until about 15 minutes after the posted start time because of some sort of miscommunication where the teachers couldn't get the keys to open the storage closets and get the equipment. Still, I was super really a lot glad that I wasn't the only girl in the class. As far as I could tell the class was actually about 1/3 girls, and one of them was also named Rebecca. (We high fived and became BFFs. lol)

Class started with stretching. I took a yoga class last semester, so all of that was pretty familiar with me and I've always prided myself on being rather flexible to make up for the fact that I had almost no strength or stamina. And then we started warming up. Holy. Cheese-on-a-stick. The stuff we did was absolutely crazy! Every single exercise was either crouching down or on all fours. We did this with almost no breaks. We couldn't stand up to stretch. For like, 20 minutes. I lasted maybe 15 before I had to stop because I thought I was going to hyperventilate. I joined in again at the very end so I wouldn't feel like a big fat wuss, but still. I felt like a big fat wuss.

After the warm up, things got better. I still felt like a pile of cooked noodles, but now we were going to actually learn something. And we did! I managed to learn how to vault over an obstacle and only tripped twice. Eventually you're supposed to be able to do it without the use of your hands, but that was way too advanced (and scary) for me. I also learned how to 'tic-tac.' That's the actual name of the move and it looks like this:

At the end this dude in the video does a cat leap, which I also learned. All in all, I ended up falling less than a dozen times and I'm pretty sure I bruised the three smallest toes on my left foot from landing on them funny. But it was so amazing to have actually accomplished something. Sure, I sucked at all the moves, but I had the basics down and it was definitely a good start. After class I had to make the 45 minute journey home, and I was poooooooooooooooped! I was so tired that I actually considered not taking a shower, even though I'd sweated like a pig. I did eventually somehow shower and make it to bed, but boy, I was sore for the next few days. It took me about five days to fully recover, but I was so looking forward to the next class.

Unfortunately I had to skip last week's freerunning session because I'd fallen behind on homework, but I'm definitely making it to the next one. I'll try to take pictures and maybe even some video to put up later. :)

Pictures and Portal

Time is such a precious commodity, especially here in London where I spent close to an hour and a half everyday commuting. It's difficult for me to find the time to blog! I've been quite busy with school and work and exploring and shopping and eating and playing. Here's what I've been doing lately.

Improvising. Our kitchen here is really small and I don't exactly have a lot of room to store food. In fact, I have exactly half a drawer in the freezer, one and half shelves in the fridge, and one shelf in the cabinets. So sometimes, I have to be creative with my dinners. This is what I made last week and it turned out absolutely AWESOME. I wasn't sure how it was going to turn out, but boy, did it ever. I wanted to try and make breaded chicken, but I didn't have any bread, so instead I tried crushing up croutons. That didn't really work, so I just threw them in with the chicken and some butter and let them cook. Then I warmed up some frozen veggies (to be healthy) and also melted some cheese over left over spaghetti noodles. It was super tasty. I'm pretty sure I'll be doing the 'croutons-as-breading' thing again when I get back home. I can't wait until I have a full kitchen and my disposal again, though. There are a lot of recipes that I want to try out that I just can't here. Specifically ham and egg corn muffins. They're like cornbread, but with ham and egg in them! A portable, delicious breakfast. :) Yummy. 

Went to go see a musical in Piccadilly! This one, actually, which I've seen before, but it's super awesome and I found some pretty cheap tickets, so I went again. I got the tickets at the TKTS booth in Leicester Square, where they sell tickets for shows that aren't sold out yet the day of. My Phantom of the Opera ticket cost me about 42 pounds, which translates to about $55 USD. I'm probably going to buy tickets there for all the other shows I'll be seeing, like Lion King and Sound of Music. Yay musicals!

This is the theater I went to. It looks big, but once inside, it's actually quite small. I'd actually say that my high school auditorium was about the same size, or perhaps even bigger than the theater. I liked the performance though. The small space made the show feel more cozy and the singers were really spectacular, especially the girl who played Christine.

Kensington Palace!! Rumor has it that William and Kate are going to move in here soon. Right now though, there is a lot of construction going on and there's also a gallery thingy featuring all the royal princesses who have lived there. In order to get here you need to walk through the Palace gardens. While I was walking all I  could think about was "MAN! I missed green things so much!" There isn't a whole lot of open space or grass anywhere in London, except for the parks and palace gardens. That's definitely one thing I miss about America. So much space there!

This is just a neat garden arch in the palace gardens that I found. :) I thought it was cute.

A cool mirror in the displays in the Palace.

IT'S A GHOST! Just kidding. Another display thing. A lot of displays were very sad and haunting. British princesses were not very happy ladies.

SQUIRREL! The wildlife, if you can call it that, here are not shy at all. I was standing about two feet away from this squirrel and he was just like 'Meh. I'm eating this nut.' Also, not a whole lot of people know this, but I'm kind of like a dog when it comes to squirrels. I think they're cute, so when I see one, I yell out "SQUIRREL!"

Pelicans in St. James's Park. They were really big and a little intimidating.

I also went to a little art gallery. This is just giant blobs of acrylic paint on canvas that the artist swirled around to make this image. I thought it was really cool, because up close you could see each and every individual paint blob, and even some white canvas underneath where he left it open.

The Beatles, obviously. But this portrait is made out of VINYL RECORDS! How cool is that??

Doesn't this look absolutely delicious? It's actually just strips of paper rolled up and bent in certain ways, then glued onto a board. This form of art is actually pretty old. It originated back in the 1800s and was called "quilling." Originally one would wrap the strips of paper around a quill, thus the name.

Walked down what is called an 'arcade,' which is basically like a mini strip mall, but also sheltered from the rain and weather. This particular arcade was near the Bond Street area, which is famous for being the center of shopping in London. There were soooooooooooo many fancy dancy shops there, like freaking Louis Vuitton and Chanel and all that name brand stuff. Very posh. Anyways, there were also a lot of really neat jewelry shops. All way out of my price range, but super duper pretty. I don't know what this skull was made out of, but it looked really cool, so I took a picture. :)

OMG SO SPARKLY! Some of these jewelry bits ran up to like, 14,000 pounds. THAT IS SO MUCH MONEY!! D: But they were so pretty.

Fancy perfume bottles. Didn't see a price tag, but no doubt they were all very expensive.

This green pendant reminded me of the Sailor Moon locket. LOL.

Really neat little pins!

OMG LONDON! Guards. I wanted to take a picture with them, but I was traveling with a group, so I couldn't stop.

The changing of the guards! It was pretty neat to see, actually. I didn't want to take video, because my iPod was running out of battery.

The view of Westminster from St. James's Park. You can see the London eye!

Here's another shot of Westminster Abbey, which we walked by. I think I'm going to have to go take a tour of that before I come home.

Other than exploring London, I've really been into playing Portal lately. It's a physics based puzzle game that is super duper fun! It came out in 2007 in a sort of "game pack" and quickly became a indie favorite. The whole premise of the game is that you are a 'test subject' who must solve puzzles using a 'portal gun,' which can shoot two interconnected 'portals' onto any 'portal-able' surface. The portals are set up so that when you step through one, you come out the other, and momentum and gravity are not affected by the portals at all. So, if you shoot one portal on the ceiling directly above you, and then shoot the other directly below you, you would fall FOREVER. It's so much fun, but can be pretty disorienting if you play it for too long. Anyways, the game company, Valve, just came out with a Portal 2 a while ago, and I haven't been able to play it yet. I've watched a few people play it on Youtube and it looks sooooooooooo fun! Once I get back home, I will definitely get it though. Yay! Fun!

Writing Wednesday: Madness

Here's a piece that I wrote for my "Writing London" class. It's a class mainly focused on essays and creative non-fiction, but the prompt "What is madness?" just got me going too far for me to focus on the non-fiction part of it. I have to say though, that I've recently been getting into lists and visuals, in terms of writing. I get lots of images and thoughts in my head, which I then translate to paper. Anyways, this one is really "trippy," but I enjoyed writing it and hope you enjoy reading it! :)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Neurons firing randomly, like suicidal lightning bugs, driving with their feet stuck on the pedal, racing for the edge of the world. Don’t tell me I don’t know crazy. There are lots of ways to go crazy, and I’ve walked down all of those lines. People look at me like I’m some sort of mutant, crawled up from the dark, bubbling marshes, here to infiltrate and contaminate their perfect, limited lives. I see you. All of you, floating around in your safe little bubbles, just waiting to be popped and injected with cold, black sludge, until your insides feel like their floating in the empty void of deep space and the Milky Way stretches between your navel and your appendix. I’m still trying to find the last half of my liver and the lower portion of my right lung. I think they’re lost in the Hourglass Nebulae somewhere. Hopefully they’ve found each other some how and are floating around together. My liver’d be lonely otherwise. Sometimes I wish that I was out there with them. Then I wouldn’t be alone either.

Instead I’m stuck here, inside a circular room, and they’ve told me to sit in the corner. I’m pretty sure the room is located on the end of a telescope and someone is trying to adjust it, because it keeps getting smaller and smaller. Sometimes there are shadows, shaped like people or doors or trees. But they’re never there when I look straight at them. The walls are like marshmallows. They taste like marshmallows, but they feel like rocks in my tummy. It’s comfortable here, except on laundry days when they throw my marshmallow room into the dryer and put it on tumble. I hate laundry days. It washes away all the pretty words on my marshmallow walls. The words say “crazy, insane, batty, loony, lost.” They remind me of who I am. Who are you?

~~~~~~~~~~~

So there you have it! Until next time!

~Becca

Eurogamer Expo 2011

So I had an extremely awesome stroke of luck in that the Eurogamer Expo 2011 was being held literally TWO BLOCKS away from my flat. Having never been to an expo or a con before, I decided to go. It was awesome!!

This is the Earl's Court convention center, right across the street from the Earl's Court tube station.

Waiting in the queue. British people don't call them "lines." They're "queues" here.

Awesome hanging display for Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. On a complete and total tangent, you should check out this video to have your mind completely blown. The new theme for Skyward Sword actually contains Zelda's Lullaby, but BACKWARDS!! But in any case.

Link was there! :D

They're making Fruit Ninja for the Kinect! I played it and it's really difficult, actually. The guy before me got a score of like 400 something, and my score was like, 60 something. I felt bad, because on my iTouch the high score is actually 400 something.

R2D2 was also there! He moved around and screamed and everything! I would have included a video, but the guy controlling him decided to be dumb and not have him do anything while I was recording. :P

EPIC Assassin's Creed sweatshirt that I want SOOOOO BADLY!!!!1 Unfortunately this is just a promotional item and not for sale. Ubisoft has yet to confirm the shirt company's design and what not, so it won't be on sale for a while. AND IT COSTS 30 POUNDS! That's like, $40 in American money.

Darth Vader and Obi Wan also attended. There were also Stormtroopers walking around, and I was tempted to ask one of them if he was a little too short to be a Stormtrooper. Hee hee! I was too shy though. I'm actually pretty shy when I'm all by myself.

And here's Link again. Or, specifically, a guy cosplaying as Link. His costume didn't look too bad, or too complicated actually. A little warm though, with the turtleneck. I think Link might be a great and easy Halloween costume for me this October. It'll also be a little funny, because a few years ago I was Zelda.

Also, it should be noted that I took this picture while "Link" was playing "Rise of Nightmares," a horror-adventure game, similar to Silent Hill, but for the Kinect. So it's a scary game, that you play WITH YOUR OWN BODY. When there are zombies coming at you, you have to punch WITH YOUR OWN FIST to get them away. If there's a key at the bottom of a toilet bowl full of blood, you have to physically "reach in" to grab it. It was quite scary and gory. You get lots of different weapons to hit the zombies with, such as brass knuckles, steel pipes, and chainsaws, but there are also scenes of torture, mutilation and other gross stuff. It was in the "over 18" area, so I wasn't terribly surprised.

  I tried playing it  it and flipped out when one of the zombies grabbed my character by the neck. In those instances, you have to push the zombie away. Movement in that game is pretty weird, though, I have to say. You step forward with one foot to move forward, and then back to move backwards, and turns are navigated by turning your shoulders left and right. It's quite odd. Check out a video of it here. All in all, it's an alright game. Not super awesome, but a step in the right direction for Kinect games.

This is me, modeling the FREE Assassin's Creed: Revelations t-shirt that I got. I also got to see some exclusive footage in a developer session, as well as some live gameplay and things like that. It was pretty cool, and I'm super excited about the release on November 15th. Unfortunately I won't get to play it for a while, because I haven't even played Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood yet. :(

So that was my first gamer expo experience! I definitely want to go to more in the future.

P.S. Sorry about the terrible picture quality. It was pretty dark inside the convention center and I've only got my iPod Touch.

This is mah srs face.

So after a week of doing nothing in particular, things over here are about to get real. I've got my first real class this evening: Working in the UK and the EU. It's "intended to provide interns in the United Kingdom with an intellectual context and framework from which to understand their semester's experiences as employees in the British and, increasingly, European workplace." (That's word for word from the syllabus.) Even though it seems to explain itself right there on the page, I still have no idea what it's about. So I guess we'll have to see.

Also, my Arcadia email has been on the fritz for a while now, and it's only just gotten fixed today. This really really sucks, because I've been getting emails for the past few days detailing what homework and assignments will be due on my first day of class for my two writing classes. And now I'm behind. Boo. :(

I'm going to have to get down to business in order to catch up. Guess it's that time again. TIME TO MAKE A SCHEDULE!! At UW-Madison, I'm part of a scholarship program called the 'Chancellor's Scholars' and one thing we have to do every semester is make a schedule and send it in to our advisors so they can see what we're up to and that we're being active in our learning environments. In all honestly, most people just make it up and don't really follow it, but I find that just having a schedule will help me keep my life on track, even if I don't like them. Schedules, I find, are more "guidelines" or "suggestions" rather than rules. But I've talked about this in a previous post, which you can look up in the side bar, should you desire. In any case, I've really got to get cracking on homework and stuff. Until next time!

Cheers!

As a treat, here are a list of more odd and interesting things I've learned in London so far.

1) Watching soccer -excuse me- football games at pubs is really fun. Almost as fun as being in the stadium!

2) I live about a fifteen minute walk away from Chelsea stadium. Gotta get me some tickets for a game soon!

3) Drunk people repeat themselves a lot.

4) The London Underground isn't as confusing as most people think. Although you shouldn't let your guard down. There are a lot of renovation projects going on at all times, so when you least expect it, your stop will be closed and you'll be forced to take a different route home.

5) Everyone here is pretty fashion-forward. It makes me feel like I don't have enough clothes. 

6) NO PUBLIC RESTROOMS! WTF?  The other day I paid 50 pence to use a bathroom in the London Underground. Definitely a first for me.

7) Also, they don't say "bathroom" over here. Instead, they say "toilet."

8) Haven't heard anyone use "bloody hell" as a swear yet. I have heard someone say "wanker" though. It was an old guy in the pub at the football game.

9) There are no convenience stores similar to Walmart or Walgreens or Target over here. NO ONE SELLS THINGS LIKE WATER BOTTLES OR LAUNDRY BASKETS! For those types of things you have to go to a place called "Argos." It's a really odd place. What you do is page through a cataloge and each item has a corresponding number. You punch the number into a little keypad, which will tell you if that store has the item you want in stock. You jot down all the numbers of all the items you want, give it to a cashier, pay for them, and the cashier will go off somewhere (pretty sure they've got like, an extra dimension hidden somewhere in the back where they store all their products) and bring your items back. And then off you go! All this without ever wandering down an aisle or reaching to the back to get the most pristine "whatever." It was kind of odd, but also sort of cool. 

Amazing Things and Not-So-Amazing Things

Here's what I did today:

Rode the London Underground. So much fun!

St. Paul's Cathedral. OMG Awesome architecture and details.

FREAKING BIG BEN! How cool is that??

Westminster Abbey. That's me and Cynthia, one of my flatmates, down there in the bottom leftish.

Trafalgar Square.

The London Eye and the River Thames. I wanted to ride in the London Eye, but no one else wanted to and I didn't want to go all by myself. Plus it was pretty darn expensive.

SAW FREAKING SIRIUS BLACK AND COMMISSIONER GORDON LIVE IN PERSON!!!! HOLY CRAP! WHY SO SIRIUS???? (that's Gary Oldman on the left, who portrays both of those characters, in case you didn't know.) He was at the premiere of his new movie "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy."

All in all, no big deal. 

Haha! Honestly, who am I kidding? London is sooooooooooooooo awesome! I love it here! There are so many awesome things to do and see! I'm registering for classes on Thursday and start my internship next week and I can seriously barely wait. I feel like there are five billion crazy awesome cool amazing super great things to do here and I'm going to do them ALL!

However, there are a few things over here that I'm not so keen on.

1) Everyone drinks and smokes over here. And I'm not a drinker or barhopper. Like, at all. I feel like, after a long day of walking places, seeing things, learning stuff and doing activities, I just want to chill, relax, maybe read something or write something. And I don't think anyone in my flat will understand that. They're all like, "OMG Let's go out tonight! Even though we have to get up early tomorrow!" And I'm all like, "Um... I think I'm gonna pass." And then they're gonna be like, "OMG You're such a loser." And I'm gonna be like, "Aw... okay. :(" *le sigh* I dunno what to do.

2) The dijon mustard seriously tastes like nail polish. Like, it tastes so nasty, I'm pretty sure it's not safe for human consumption. D:< Blargh!

So I'm in London Now...

Here's what it looks like so far.

My traveling companion photobombs the picture of my carry-on luggage while waiting at the Milwaukee airport.

 

Here's my side of the room that I share with one other girl.

The view from our window down into the courtyard.

Another view from our window.

Doorway to my room.

Common room.

It has a TV!

Here's the view from the common room window, which faces the street.

Out the window and up the street.

Out the window and down the street.

Stairs to my room. Thank goodness there's only one flight.

Entrance hall.

Front porch.

The house! Isn't it lovely?

Little One chilling on the bookshelf, resting after a long day of traveling, shopping and unpacking.