I cope. I'm good at it. My automatic defense mechanism is repression. I like to make sure I'm so busy that I don't have time to deal with personal, emotional things. It's one of the reasons I have a tendency to overcommit.
The problem with repression is that there's always a tipping point. The problem with my brand of repression is that I don't know where that tipping point is, despite having surpassed that point at least once every semester since starting at MIT.
I've literally repressed my ability to gauge my mental health so much that the only reason I know I am stressed right now is because I have had about 3 weeks of continuous canker sores within my mouth, because I'm spotting, and because I have been tired for the past two weeks despite my attempts to get decent amounts of sleep.
So, my tipping point.
No, it wasn't the chain suicides MIT has had in the past two weeks.
It was the conversation my French professor had with our class in response to the suicides. She told us about her taking medical leave last year because she had been diagnosed with cancer, and the subsequent chemotherapy afterwards. She told us about how she got through the worst of chemo because of the people around her. She wanted to remind us that we weren't alone.
It was a good conversation.
Unfortunately, cancer is one of the few things that I cannot talk about without getting ridiculously upset.
My grandmother passed away from breast cancer my sophomore year of high school, on January 15th, 2010. She had been diagnosed earlier that year - the story I was fed at the time was that she had been watching a drama where the protagonist had been diagnosed with cancer, which inspired her to get a check-up specifically to look for cancer signs, when in actuality she had been a victim of horrific trauma which caused her systems to shut down. She underwent surgery despite her own protestations because my aunt, panicked, signed for it. She then underwent chemotherapy.
As a 13 year old child, I didn't really understand what was happening. What I did understand was that grandma was sick. I knew that the chemo was making her absolutely miserable even though I was only home a few weeks a year because I was at boarding school and even though she tried to hide it from me.
I will never forget the shock I felt when I went into her room and saw her wig that she used to hide her hair loss. I hadn't known prior to the discovery that chemotherapy made you lose your hair.
Honestly, I don't remember much from when I was 13. I remember my grandma always being happy and strong and learning English to communicate with me. I remember her making the best pickled radish I have ever had. I remember learning about her getting sick and how she didn't seem any different. I remember my grandma fighting with my mom and at one point hearing her say she had given up. I remember my grandma trying to survive for her grandchildren.
I remember the last time I ever saw her, lying frail and thin and weak in a hospital bed, attached to what seemed like hundreds of different tubes, unable to even breathe.
I remember the doctors telling us she was doing better.
She didn't do better.
I remember on January 11th, 2010, I drew a picture of death in my sketchbook. I remember writing down how I felt about the whole ordeal. I distinctly remember wondering what would happen if she passed away on my sister's birthday.
She passed away the day my sister turned 1.
I remember on that day I went back to that drawing and wrote that I had cursed my grandma into dying that day.
I remember being told my grandma passed away and that I wouldn't be able to return to China to say goodbye, because my parents wanted me to focus on my studies.
As if I could focus on something as trivial as The Canterbury Tales or Pre-Calculus when my grandmother had just been taken from me.
So I repressed the memory. I don't think about these moments. I think about my grandma when she was in her prime, caring for me and my parents and my aunt's family. I think about her quirks, like how she liked to put her soup dumplings in milk in a bowl and heat them up and how she thought that was tasty. I think about her obsession with Chinese herbal medicines and how she used to stink up the house.
I don't think about the memories associated with her being diagnosed with cancer.
I have a terrible case of survivor's guilt, one that has continuously been repressed since I was 13. It's been 6 years. Sometimes I still think about how it must be my fault that she passed away so coincidentally on Hera's birthday. Sometimes I still think about how if I had somehow had shown that I cared more, she wouldn't have given up.
The conversation we had today with my French professor drenched up all of these memories that I had repressed, and coupled with the amount of stress that I am apparently dealing with even though I don't seem to feel or recognize it - I ended up breaking down in class.
So I want to thank everyone that had to deal with me bawling my face off all day today, whether it be my French II classmates who tactfully didn't say anything, or my French II architecture grad student buddy who walked me to studio, to the people I ended up crying to in studio. I'm not in a good place. Again.
My roommate thinks that I should go to Mental Health, but thats a whole other blog post in which I get to talk about the stigma around mental health and how much of a non-issue my culture believes it to be. I'm definitely considering it, though. Again.
Maybe this time I'll actually seek help.
So approximately a quarter of the semester has already gone by. It simultaneously doesn't really feel like we've been in school for long, because of the snow days we ended up getting, and feels like we've been in school forever. I can't wait for a real break - just three more weeks to go!
Confession time: I did a dumb thing and overcommitted, again. Silly me thought, oh I'm only taking 3 classes this semester, I can fill all the extra free time I'll have with fun things like dancing all the guest performances.....and jobs. Except I didn't think about the fact that my biggest time crunch is and always will be studio, and I am still taking a studio.
And by the time I realized, I was already committed and I'm now technically working 4 jobs. 2 UROPs (Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program), one with John Ochsendorf, who's a professor in Civil Engineering (course 1) and Architecture (course 4), and who's possibly the coolest person on the planet (shh don't tell him I said that), and the other a continuation of the UROP I've been doing with Meejin Yoon. Which, by the way, is super awesome because that project I worked on kind of over the summer? Yeah, the Collier Memorial? Its being built and I get to see it happen.
I'm also babysitting a 15 month old boy 3 times a week for an hour each, and tutoring about once every two or three weeks.
Just so you know, no one should ever do this.
Just no.
Don't do it.
All of it is pretty fun, some more fun than others, and I get to make bank, but I don't have any time, at all. I wake up at 8 every morning and sleep at 1 or 2 every night, which seems like a fair amount (6-7 hours? College students can survive on that, right?) but the lack of sleep adds up. Just Sunday, my friend took one look at me and asked me if I had lost weight.
The last time she saw me was the Sunday prior.
Oops.
On the other hand, my classes have been going fairly well:
French II is surprisingly more difficult than I thought it was going to be. French I was a breeze, and I kind of assumed the second course would also be fairly simple. Wrong. Grammar is hard, and the fact that the only two languages I speak, English and Chinese, have approximately zero grammar at all doesn't help.
Also sometimes I get French confused with weird Japanese phrases that I know, which is probably the strangest experience ever. The languages are not similar at all.
Psychology of Gender and Race is super awesome, just as I thought it would be! I'm taking it with one of my roommates, so it gives us something to talk and laugh about as we trudge through the snow on our way home every Thursday night at 10 pm. Also, people are really uncomfortable talking about intimate things - not meaning intimate stories about themselves, but intimate things such as clitorises and penises and piggy-piling - in the class, which makes it infinitely more entertaining.
Last but not least, studio. My biggest nightmare. We've been working for the past month on a mapping exercise, where we study a certain aspect of our site in depth and quite literally map it out. Our review was last Friday, and my professor decided that I should redo the entire thing over the weekend to reflect the critiques given, which was good in that now I have a stellar map that shows what I want it to show and conveys multiple layers of information, and bad in that the review was over and I really didn't want to draw more lines.
I also have two sections - one with buildings and one without - next to the axons to depict the two layers of infrastructure that goes on around the site.
I guess that's what I've been up to lately, busying myself with a bunch of stuff and getting not enough sleep to make me sufficiently happy! How have you guys been lately? Comment below and let me know!
I was introduced to the concept of Implicit Association Tests (IATs) in my Women and Gender Studies class, where we then went on to take multiple tests and write about our findings of our own internal biases in a paper.
IATs measure your conscious and unconscious associations with different kinds of people by asking you to pair words or images with other words or images and looking at your reaction times. If you're interested in taking any yourself, you can find them here. These tests aren't definitive of you or your personality, and obviously a lot of things factor into how their measurements could be faulty, for example, right-handedness / left-handedness, but they do give you a good idea overall of your internal biases and stereotypes.
Why is knowing about them important? I think that knowing about how your mind jumps to conclusions about different people is important because then you can understand that maybe what you're thinking is wrong or unfair. For example, if you are an employer and you know you have a bias towards white people vs. black people, then it helps you make more educated decisions in choosing your employees as opposed to employing a bunch of people and then wondering why your entire company is whitewashed (because no, I can guarantee most of the time this is not because only white people are super qualified for your jobs).
To summarise my paper, I found through the IATs that I'm fairly unbiased for most things - here is my list of results and my immediate reactions:
Your data suggest little or no association between Native Am. and White Am. with Foreign and American.
Not surprising at all. I'm not American, the relationship between Native Americans and White Americans is literally something I never think about.
Your data suggest a moderate association of Asian American with American and European American with Foreign compared to European American with American and Asian American with Foreign.
This was kind of funny but I realized that I tend to associate white people with Europe more because when I was little I spent many summers traveling in Europe where, surprise surprise, there's a lot of white people. Also, I probably do it in defense of all the "Where are you really from?" questions I get all the time. (Don't ask this. Ever. Also, RUDE.)
Not surprising at all. I'm not American, the relationship between Native Americans and White Americans is literally something I never think about.
Your data suggest a moderate association of Asian American with American and European American with Foreign compared to European American with American and Asian American with Foreign.
This was kind of funny but I realized that I tend to associate white people with Europe more because when I was little I spent many summers traveling in Europe where, surprise surprise, there's a lot of white people. Also, I probably do it in defense of all the "Where are you really from?" questions I get all the time. (Don't ask this. Ever. Also, RUDE.)
Your data suggest a slight automatic preference for Arab Muslims compared to Other People.
This was hilarious and completely unexpected but very nice to know. You Arab-Muslims out there, I got your back. Apparently. ;)
Your data suggest a slight association of Male with Career and Female with Family compared to Female with Career and Male with Family.
This was frustrating because my mom traveled when I was little and my dad stayed home with me, so why would I have an internal bias for the opposite? Probably because I was aware from a very young age that my home was an anomaly? Also, I tend to associate women with many more things than Career (mom tends to spread herself thin and do all the things), whereas I associate men with only one thing (because they're wired to be very single-minded).
Your data suggest little or no association between Female and Male with Science and Liberal Arts.
Well, duh. I grew up in China and China thinks that the liberal arts are useless. My dad says all the time, "Master math, physics, and chemistry, and you can walk anywhere under the heavens without being afraid." (The Chinese version of this is a lot shorter and sounds a lot better.)
Your data suggest a moderate automatic preference for Light Skin compared to Dark Skin.
Also unsurprising: Asian beauty standards dictate that lighter skin is better than darker skin. In China they say that the perfect man is "tall, rich, handsome" and the perfect woman is "white, rich, beautiful". Also notice the importance of being rich in Chinese eyes.
Your data suggest little to no automatic preference between Straight People and Gay People.
Super surprising! Asians tend to be fairly homophobic and since I grew up in China thats what I thought I would end up being (despite all my protestations), so this was a huge relief to me. Since homosexuality is so taboo in China, they don't really talk about it - the first time I was exposed to the idea of it, I was in the US and was, by then, making friends with all sorts of people, so I guess they shaped my stereotypes and biases (or non-stereotypes and non-biases?) into what it ended up being today.
Your data suggest a moderate automatic preference for European American compared to African American.
This was the only result I got that made me extremely disappointed in myself. I've known for a long time that I grew up in a somewhat racist family (Asians are generally literally the most racist people ever. They don't even like other Asians.) but I thought that my exposure to non-Asian, non-White people in high school would help counteract it. Hell, one of my favorite people is black. But I guess four years of high school of being friends with not very many black people and learning about their culture and themselves can't counteract the thirteen years before of being exposed to only Asians and White people - I do tend to find myself attracted to white people a lot faster than to black people (not to say that I haven't been attracted to black people. A lot of you out there are very, very attractive. sigh.)
This was hilarious and completely unexpected but very nice to know. You Arab-Muslims out there, I got your back. Apparently. ;)
Your data suggest a slight association of Male with Career and Female with Family compared to Female with Career and Male with Family.
This was frustrating because my mom traveled when I was little and my dad stayed home with me, so why would I have an internal bias for the opposite? Probably because I was aware from a very young age that my home was an anomaly? Also, I tend to associate women with many more things than Career (mom tends to spread herself thin and do all the things), whereas I associate men with only one thing (because they're wired to be very single-minded).
Your data suggest little or no association between Female and Male with Science and Liberal Arts.
Well, duh. I grew up in China and China thinks that the liberal arts are useless. My dad says all the time, "Master math, physics, and chemistry, and you can walk anywhere under the heavens without being afraid." (The Chinese version of this is a lot shorter and sounds a lot better.)
Your data suggest a moderate automatic preference for Light Skin compared to Dark Skin.
Also unsurprising: Asian beauty standards dictate that lighter skin is better than darker skin. In China they say that the perfect man is "tall, rich, handsome" and the perfect woman is "white, rich, beautiful". Also notice the importance of being rich in Chinese eyes.
Your data suggest little to no automatic preference between Straight People and Gay People.
Super surprising! Asians tend to be fairly homophobic and since I grew up in China thats what I thought I would end up being (despite all my protestations), so this was a huge relief to me. Since homosexuality is so taboo in China, they don't really talk about it - the first time I was exposed to the idea of it, I was in the US and was, by then, making friends with all sorts of people, so I guess they shaped my stereotypes and biases (or non-stereotypes and non-biases?) into what it ended up being today.
Your data suggest a moderate automatic preference for European American compared to African American.
This was the only result I got that made me extremely disappointed in myself. I've known for a long time that I grew up in a somewhat racist family (Asians are generally literally the most racist people ever. They don't even like other Asians.) but I thought that my exposure to non-Asian, non-White people in high school would help counteract it. Hell, one of my favorite people is black. But I guess four years of high school of being friends with not very many black people and learning about their culture and themselves can't counteract the thirteen years before of being exposed to only Asians and White people - I do tend to find myself attracted to white people a lot faster than to black people (not to say that I haven't been attracted to black people. A lot of you out there are very, very attractive. sigh.)
Now that I know these automatic associations about how I view other people, I can hopefully counteract it in my conscious mind. All in all, it was a really interesting project and I learned a lot about myself, even if I had some issues with how some of the tests were set up. I hope you take the time to do a few of the IATs too (link above!) and don't forget to let me know what you think about them and your results!
Now that I've had one of each class that I'll be taking this spring semester, I thought I'd recap my first week (more like semi-week) of the spring semester. Long story short, I'm taking 3 classes, one of which looks like it's going to be - let's just say, a loooooong semester - and the other two which look like they'll be loads of fun.
Bet you can't guess which one looks like it's going to suck butt.
Studio, or 4.024, or 4.115:
This is the only class I'm taking this semester that's within my major (the first time this has happened since freshman year!). So far we have been given a mapping exercise, where we look at different aspects around the site given (such as traffic patterns, history, wind pollution, etc), but we haven't actually been given our project yet, so basically literally everyone is confused about what's going on.
So far, the professor has given all of us a pretty terrible first impression - she doesn't pay attention when we present our ideas to her, she talks over everyone, she goes on ridiculous tangents, and she's just rude. I really hope it'll get better as the semester goes along.
French II, or 21F.302:
It's French 2 and my professor is possibly the cutest person ever. We've had two snow days and she emailed us saying that she hopes we're staying warm, drinking hot chocolate, and watching French films. (I have been staying warm but I haven't been drinking hot cocoa or watching French films. I've been watching a ridiculous Korean reality TV show and reading Le Petit Prince and sleeping.)
Psychology of Gender and Race, or WGS.228, or 9.75:
Honestly, I took this class because I needed to fulfill my HASS-S requirement (I tried to do this once by taking 9.00, or Intro to Psychology, and I gave up on it because I hate memorizing) and because my friend strongly recommended it. But I've only had one class so far and it looks really good! I'm actually really excited about it, despite it having an exam to look forward to at the end of the semester....
Unfortunately, I can't really say much more about the classes because I've only had a couple sessions of each (or in the case of WGS.228, only one) because of the snow! Boston has been in major shut down and I haven't left the house at all, save for one trip to the grocery store today. And rehearsal later, I guess, for ADT.
Speaking of which, I'm super excited about it because I got into the dance I wanted to get into!!!
How has the snow been treating you? Are you in school? What classes are you taking and are you excited about them?
