Góc của Riêu...

TÌnh yêu và chuyện apply

2010-12-15T23:21:00.002-07:00

Thưa các bạn bè gần xa, bà con cô bác,

Thực ra mình cũng không định viết cái note vào lúc nước sôi lửa bỏng thế này. Cái thằng cha Academic Dean trường mình để Science final và math final vào cùng một ngày (mỗi môn 2 tiếng) làm cả trường rất là ức xừ chế. Bây giờ quanh dorm thỉnh thoảng đang có tiếng rú của những con người thức đêm nhìn chằm chằm vào quyển sách Bio mà bế tắc, hay những con người nhảy lò cò quanh dorm vì bị caffeine high, như mình 1 phút trước đây thôi.

Nhưng trong cái lúc hỗn loạn đó, trí tưởng tượng của mình lại có dịp bay xa bay cao. Trong lúc ân cần dỗ dành một người bạn vừa vào kiếp deferred, mình chợt nhận ra rằng chuyện apply cũng như là chuyện một chàng trai và một cô gái vậy. Applicants là chàng trai và college chính là cô gái ....

Chàng irai: Em à, em có biết anh yêu em thế nào không. Anh đã bao đêm thức trắng bên bàn phím để gõ những bức thư tình cho em, sau đó còn đọc đi đọc lại bao lần để đảm bảo rằng em sẽ hiểu đúng những gì anh muốn nói. Anh biết rằng, để tình yêu chúng ta bền vững, tình yêu không phải là tất cả. THé nên anh đã minh chứng cho em thấy rằng anh có đủ khả năng tài chính để chu cấp cho em trong cuộc đời này. Em à, em có muốn sẽ ở bên anh mãi mãi hay không?

Nếu applicant dc accept (hí hí hí)

Cô gái: Anh ơi, sao khi đọc những bức thư đầy cảm xúc của anh, em thấy tim mình rạo rực. Em tưởng tượng đến một cuộc sống có anh bên cạnh, nâng niu em, giúp đỡ em. EM sẽ rất tự hào khi ở bên anh và em biết rằng tương lai anh sẽ còn tiếng xa hơn nữa.

Nếu applicant bị reject

Cô gái: Anh à, em cũng cảm động trước tấm lòng của anh. Nhưng bố em mai mối cho em với một gia đình khác thế lực trong vùng rồi anh à. Em biết anh là người tốt và em tin rằng anh sẽ tìm được một người con gái hợp với mình.

hoặc là

Bố cô gái cầm chổi ra đuổi thẳng chàng trai đang cây si đưới cổng nhà :p

Nếu applicant bị defer

Cô gái: ANh à, anh thật lãng mạn và đáng yêu. Nhưng tình cảm là chuyện quan trọng đối với em, em muốn dành thời gian suy nghĩ .Em mong rằng anh sẽ là người đàn ông dành cho em và sẽ luôn bên em trong cuộc đời này. Em nghĩ thời gian sẽ là câu trả lời cho đôi ta....

Tự ngầm nghĩ lại thì năm nào cũng có đôi này hợp, đôi này tan....Chuyện apply cũng như chuyện tình vậy, khó dự báo, khó giải thích hay tìm lý do. Có những cô gái đẹp yêu những chàng trai ăn mày, hay người ta gọi đó là tiếng sét ái tình mặc cho người khác ngăn cản. Có khi cô gái yêu đơn phương một chàng khác (mặc dù chàng ta bỏ cô nàng đi cặp với con gái làng bên), để lại một anh thư sinh khác ngày đêm viết bao bức thư tình không dám gửi. Ôi, cho dù có là chuyện tình cảm hay apply, thì con tim cũng phải bao lần suýt rơi rụng. Nhưng mà cũng may, college nào mà accept mình thì nó còn gưi phong bì to chứ còn mấy vụ tình cam này có khi cô gái viết thư kiểu dài dòng quanh co đọc xong chả biết là có theo minh fhay không nữa.

Tình yêu thật rắc rối làm sao...

CÒn về phía mình, tự nhủ college như là một chàng trai. Ông bà ta có câu" Trâu đi tìm cọc" chứ không có cọc đi tìm trâu. Các bạn gái, hãy tự hào mình là những cô gái đi tìm tình yêu đích thực cho cuộc đời mình >:D<

Mình đang rất muốn tìm lý do để tiếp tục nghiên cứu khả năng procrastinate của con người (mới đây mình vừa được nhận bằng doctorate về Procrastinationology), thế nên mình xin đáp ứng mong mỏi của độc giả và viết tiếp chút ít cho một số trường hợp khác cũng có phần nào liên quan tới tình yêu và đại học.

Dù đó có là tình yêu, tất nhiên sẽ có lúc chán. Sẽ có lúc nhận ra cái người mình yêu không hoàn hảo như mình nghĩ (cô nàng toàn làm cháy rau muống xào hay là "vật chất không đáp ứng như câu/không tiên nghi" (cái này mọi người tự suy nha), chàng trai sẽ bắt đầu nghĩ về những người con gái khác. Trong thời đại công nghệ thông tin, website của các trường đại học với những hình ảnh được mông má đẹp mê hồn trần đóng vai trò như match.com hoặc là zoosk.com, bằng một cách kỳ diệu nào đó, mang hai con người đến với nhau. Đó là transfer :)

Còn về drop out hay graduate, mình tự nghĩ không nên discourage những bạn trẻ ngày đêm đang mong chờ đi học đại học nghĩ về những chuyện quá xa xôi. Cái đó cũng giống như là mới cảm nắng tí xiu mà đã nghĩ tới chuyện chia tay vậy, e rằng không nên. Ta yêu thì ta cứ yêu thôi, sao phải xoắn. Còn nếu vì một lý do nào đó mà mối tình của ta phải chấm dứt, chắc phải nhờ một vị giáo sư khác sâu sắc hơn bàn tán vậy :p

...

2010-06-04T00:16:00.000-07:00

Đường tít tắp không gian như bể
Anh chờ em cho em vịn bàn tay
Trong tay anh, tay của em đây
Biết lặng lẽ vun trồng gìn giữ
…..
Em nhẹ nhàng xoa dịu nỗi đau
Và góp nhặt niềm vui từ mọi ngả
Khi anh vắng bàn tay em biết nhớ
Lấy thời gian đan thành áo mong chờ
Lấy thời gian em viết những dòng thơ
Để thấy đựoc chúng mình không cách trở…
Bàn tay em, gia tài bé nhỏ
Em trao anh cùng với cuộc đời em.
Xuân Quỳnh – Bàn Tay em

So are you ready for summer yet?

2010-05-03T15:48:00.001-07:00

This summer!
1. Reading list:
- Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
- July, July – Tim O’Brien
- The master and margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
- Love medicine – Louise Erdrich
- The soloist: a lost dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music – Steve Lopez

2. Working on:
- ACT
- SAT II Literature, Chemistry, Math II
- How to read a poem and fall in love with poetry – Edward Hirsch
- Music extended essay – Quan họ Bắc Ninh
- Musical Investigation – Comparison of Baroque suites and traditional Irish Celtic dance music
- Music compositions
- Some pieces for recording:
+ Sonata No.8 Pathetique 3rd mvt – Beethoven
+ The Harlem rag – Tom Turpin or Maple leaf rag – Scott Joplin
+ Rondo Capriccioso Op.14 – Felix Mendelssohn
+ Fugue No.2 (Well-tempered Clavier) – Bach
+ Big my secret (The Piano soundtrack) – Michael Nyman
- Common app + essays

3. Watching:
- The Soloist
- The red violin (yeah kind of old. First saw it when I was 10)
- Eat, Pray, Love (exclusively for a date with mom only)
- Bỗng Dưng Muốn khóc
- Perfume: the story of a murderer
- Glee!! (on hulu.com)
- The secret life of an American teenager (abcfamily.com – new season on air in June!)
- World Cup 2010 (only final match and any match that has Brazil)
- Some classical concerts. Hope to find some good one to celebrate Chopin’s 200th year

4. Traveling:
- Hà Giang in July
- Hochiminh city – sometimes in June/July
- Hạ Long – July
- Istanbul, Turkey – July 30th – Aug 14th

5. Wearing:
- Sun dresses, a lot of dresses
- Romper and shorts
- Say NO to jeans
- Huge sun hats
- Not forgetting colorful bikinis and sun cream to read on the beach
- Flip flops, still in love with gladiator sandals
- Light to no make-up at all
- Big sunglasses
- No big jewelry except for the awesome VVS senior ring!

6. Listening:
- A LOT of Latin American music + Spanish flamenco
- Jason Mraz
- Something fresh and happy

7. Eating:
- Don’t even let me start!

8. La place Ấu Triệu, So hot Café, Café Trung NGuyên 38B Điện Biên Phủ, Hàng Hành…find me there…

9. Don’t forget :

- Some pajamas party w/ my girls
- Karaoke
- Long distance Skype with my loves!
- Yoga & pilates everyday
- Balance my own life
- Good beauty sleeps
- A lot of water..

And I’m ready to go, summer! See you soon!! These will all go into action on May 31st, 10:40pm !

Haiku

2010-04-14T15:01:00.002-07:00

Haiku (俳句 haikai verse?) is a form of Japanese poetry, consisting of 17 moras (or on), in three metrical phrases of 5, 7, and 5 moras respectively.
(Wikipedia)
So here are some haiku I did for Theory of Knowledge class. We are currently discussing about love and romance so yeah you know why they are all about love.

1. How I draw it, love
The desire torch inside me
Flaming like wild fires.

2. Love is impatient
As cruel as Eros's arrows
Undestroyable

3. If I'm a flower
Let me be the blood red rose
To the one I love

Cô bé bên cửa sổ...

2010-04-11T18:54:00.001-07:00

Hôm nay tôi làm cô bé bên cửa sổ. Không phải vì rỗi rãi không có việc gì làm, không phải vì tuơng tư ai hay buồn bã điều gì. Tôi làm cô bé bên cửa sổ vì nhớ lại truyện Tôtôchan, muốn đuợc trở nên thánh thiện với một tâm hồn đẹp như cô bé ấy.

Tôi chẳng biết mình đã đạt đuợc mục tiêu ấy chưa. Tôi chỉ biết rằng tôi đã gạt sang một bên những bản nhạc vứt đầy trên cây đàn piano điện tử, bài vở chất đống trên giuờng, quần áo cần đem gịăt đầy hai rổ để ngồi bên cửa sổ.

Tôi ngồi lên cái giá sách, chiếc gối vuông dựa vào tuờng, mở tung rèm, mở tung cửa sổ và chân duỗi dài. Má áp vào cửa kính đã không còn lạnh buốt, tôi thấy long mình thảnh thơi. Có lẽ năm lớp 11 đã trôi qua quá nhanh mà tôi chẳng hề biết, thu sang đông, đông sang xuân và giờ đã sang hè. Mặt trời vẫn ngồi trên đỉnh Napoleon như quá êm ái không muốn đổi vị trí, mây như đi ngủ đâu mất. Cảnh vật thì vẫn vậy thôi, nhưng tôi thấy lòng mình khác lạ. Tôi chả lo cho bài vở, mùa thi. Tôi chả lo cho đại học, SÁT (như đúng cái tên của nó), chả lo ngày mai giờ Toán với thầy Forrest có bài kiểm tra. Tôi lo cho tâm hồn mình không đuợc bình yên.

Mà tâm hồn tôi có bao giờ bình yên, tim tôi có bao giờ im lặng. Tôi cũng muốn thế. Tôi mong tim mình đừng bao giờ ngừng yêu thuơng, ngừng thầm nhớ mong, ngừng mỉm cười. Tôi mong tâm hồn mình không ngừng bị thử thách để trong đẹp hơn. Tôi mong suy nghĩ của mình không ngừng chảy nhưng tôi cũng mong cơ thể tôi không ngừng làm việc theo suy nghĩ và đam mê. Chợt nghĩ một ngày nếu liệt cả ngưòi nhưng não vẫn hoạt động, có lẽ tôi sẽ tuyệt vọng đến chết mất.

Tôi lại ngồi nghĩ đến lễ tốt nghiệp năm tới của mình. Tôi và Athena sẽ hát “Dream” và Angel sẽ đệm ghita. Chúng tôi sẽ mặc váy trắng, ngồi trên hai cái ghế cao duới tán cây, dựa vào nhau và hát. Rồi sẽ có nuớc mắt, rồi sẽ có những cái ôm thật chặt. Tôi mong bố mẹ tôi, anh trai, và nhiều nguời tôi yêu mến sẽ có mặt để giúp tôi tạm biệt nơi này. Có lẽ tôi sẽ sẵn sang để rời ngôi trưòng này vì tôi tin rằng mình sẽ nhận đuợc hết những gì trưòng trao tặng, nhưng thị trấn này…Có lẽ là rất khó. Tôi sẽ nhớ căn phòng với khung cửa sổ huớng ra đỉnh Napoleon, nhớ những buổi tối cuối tuần bật nhạc thật to và cưòi đùa với lũ bạn trong khu ký túc, nhớ những hôm ôm chăn xem phim Hàn Quốc 1 ngày liền không ra khỏi phòng, nhớ những lúc thức khuya học thi mà cả khu thức cùng nhau, nhớ những viên sỏi đã hại bao đôi giầy cao gót, nhớ bãi cỏ đã bao lần xịt nuớc làm tôi uớt đẫm. Tôi sẽ nhớ những đêm ngủ không dám bật đèn vì bị doạ ma, nhớ từng guơng mặt, nhớ những gì tôi có thể nhớ…

Tôi nhìn lại mình 2 năm qua và thấy mình thật khác. Tôi không còn là con bé hồn nhiên vô tư và nhí nhảnh nữa. Tôi đã biết thế nào là yêu, thế nào là buồn, thế nào là thất vọng. Tôi cảm nhận đụơc sợi dây liên kết giữa tôi và cây đàn piano mặc dù có những lần nó làm ngón tay tôi rớm máu và cổ tay tôi trẹo đau đớn. Tôi tự tin buớc đi trên con đuờng mà tôi đã chọn hơn. Tôi mừng vì điều đó. Chỉ mong tôi sẽ là con nguời mà tôi sẽ luôn tin tuởng và yêu mến. Sẽ thật đau khổ làm sao nếu ngày mai tôi không còn hiểu bản than mình. Đâu, tôi đâu có muốn thế đâu. Tôi sẽ sống đúng với tôi mà thôi.

16 ơi..

2010-03-30T17:51:00.003-07:00

Ngưòi lớn thường nghĩ rằng tuổi 16 có biết gì là yêu? Tình cảm tuổi 16 đâu có bền vững? Tình cảm tuổi 16 đến rồi đi thôi nên giữ gìn suy nghĩ nhiều làm chi?

Nhưng tôi, một con bé sống 16 năm trên đời này, đã trả qua bao cung bậc cảm xúc khác nhau: nhẹ nhàng có, mãnh liệt có, dằn vặt có, đau khổ có, tưong tư có…Tuổi 16 của tôi tràn ngập những ngày tuơi nắng vàng với nụ cưòi trên môi và tim hát thành lời. Tuổi 16 của tôi tràn ngập những ngày u ám với những giọt nuớc mắt giấu vội chỉ muốn quên đi cho long thảnh thơi…Tuổi 16 của tôi đẹp thì cũng đẹp lắm, buồn cũng nhiều và vui cũng không ít. Tôi thầm cảm ơn những ai đã cho tôi một tuổi 16 thật đẹp, một tuổi 16 đẹp một cách hoàn hảo vì có những giọt nuớc mắt và có cả những nỗi đau không nói và những niềm vui không vẹn toàn. Nếu tất cả mọi điều đều hoàn hảo thì liệu tuổi 16 của tôi có còn đáng nhớ nữa không?

Tôi mừng vì đã giữ cho mình những trang nhật ký. Những năm tháng đến rối sẽ không quay trở lại, những cảm xúc bao giờ mới đuợc trải qua thêm một lần nữa, những giọt nuớc mắt liệu có lăn thêm một lần nữa hay những nụ cưòi liệu có còn nguyên? Trái tim liệu có còn hát vì một ngưòi và khóc vì ngưòi đó hay không? 16 ơi cứ đẹp thế này đi nhé, cứ khám phá và đừng mang nhiều đắn đo. Bao ngưòi thèm quay trở lại tuổi 16 chỉ để có lại một phút giây, một khoảnh khắc, một cái nhìn mà thôi. Vậy sao lại sợ hãi 16 ơi? Tuổi 17 đâu còn xa, sẽ lại là những cảm xúc mới đến, sẽ lại là những trải nghiệm muôn màu thì sợ nữa làm chi? Sống đúng tuổi 17 thôi vì thời gian đâu có chờ ai?

Huân chưong nào cho mẹ, cho cha?

2010-03-27T14:43:00.001-07:00

I was looking at the pictures on my friends’ facebook. I realized that a lot of Vietnamese students currently studying at big and prestigious high schools in USA have parents who are doctors, masters, who travel around the world and speak 4-5 languages. I adore these students and always hope one day I will stand at their places and have that educations that they are having. But now I’m questioning: if I were born in family with parents like that, where would I be now? United World College somewhere with full scholarship? Harvard ? MIT? Brown?

I thought it was a rude idea to think about being in a different family. My parents are not lawyer, doctor who speak 4 languages and have been to 10 or more countries around the world. My mom is just a match teacher at a secondary school in Hanoi, who can’t speak English, who is still struggling with electronic devices and has been to Singapore only. My dad is a photographer who dropped out of college and once rejected an invitation to a conference in Singapore because he couldn’t speak English.

Gia đình tôi không có cái vẻ hào nhoáng của một gia đình giàu có: không ô tô, không biệt thự, không đồ cổ, không có những chuyến du lịch nuớc ngoài và không có những bữa tiệc xa xỉ. Gia đình tôi chỉ là những con ngưòi lao động bình thuờng, trăn trở với cuộc sống mà giá cả tăng nhanh toàn vượt mặt tiền luơng công chức. Gia đình tôi có những nỗi lo như bao gia đình khác và những nỗi lo đấy làm đầy thêm những nếp nhăn trên vầng trán với những sợi tóc bạc đã ngoài 50 của bố mẹ tôi. Bố mẹ tôi có những nỗi lo cho ngưòi con cả đã đi làm và đã thành công. Bố mẹ tôi có những nỗi lo cho ngưòi bà ngoại đã ngoài 90 và cả những ngưòi họ hàng ở quê trông chờ vào trợ cấp của ngưòi thân trong những đợt hạn hán.

Có lẽ ngưòi ta nên trao huân chương anh hùng cho bố mẹ tôi, những con ngưòi bình thuờng với những trăn trở nhiều như những đam mê lớn. Tôi luôn nhớ hình ảnh mẹ tôi ngồi bên chiếc máy vi tính cũ mỗi đêm, soạn bài giảng trên máy tính với những phần mềm nước ngoài để học sinh dễ hiểu bài. Tôi nhớ những lúc 11-12 giờ đêm mẹ tôi vẫn đánh thức tôi dậy để hỏi những từ tiếng anh gặp phải trong phần mềm đó. Tôi nhớ những lúc mẹ tôi lặng lẽ làm lại những bài giảng chỉ vì không biét tiếng anh mà format lại toàn bộ những file đã lưu trữ. Còn cha tôi, tuổi 55 nào có muộn để học cho kịp thời đại! Cha tôi đêm đêm mày mò bên chiếc máy tính để học cho đuợc phần mềm photoshop với ứoc mong bán đuợc ảnh để nuôi sống gia đình nhỏ bé này. Có lẽ, ông luôn là học viên nhiều tuổi nhất trong bất kỳ một lớp học thêm về nghệ thuật nhiếp ảnh nào.Cha tôi là ngưòi gọi tôi dậy và nấu bữa sáng cho tôi lúc trời còn chưa bình minh, là nguời đưa tôi ra bến xe buýt lúc 6 giờ sáng và căn dặn xem tôi có đồng nào trong ngưòi để phòng than hay không. Cha tôi luôn là ngưòi gửi cho tôi những email ngọt ngào và cũng là random nhất hay nhờ tôi làm gián điệp cho chuyện tình cảm của anh trai tôi.

Bố mẹ tôi không phải tiến sĩ giáo sư hay bác sỹ nhưng tôi tự hào vì họ. Mẹ tôi, ở tuổi 55, tiếng anh chỉ dừng lại ở mức “yes “ và “:no”, mới đi ra nuớc ngoài 2 lần là đi Singapore chữa bệnh, 3 lần mổ vì dạ dày và ung thư vú nhưng lại 2 lần đạt giải giáo viên sáng tạo của Microsoft. Bố tôi, tuổi 55, tiếng anh cũng chỉ ở mức” hello”, cùng lắm là đi Trung Quốc vài lần, mắt đã kém và trí nhớ không còn nhạy bén, nhưng 4-5 lần đuợc huy chuơng vàng ở cuộc thi ảnh nghệ thuật ở Nhật Bản. Hai con ngưòi đó, dù mang trong mình bao trăn trở hàng đêm, vẫn nuôi đuợc hai ngưòi con đi học nuớc ngoài, trong đó có một cử nhân đã trở về nuớc làm việc và ngay lập tức trở thành một ngưòi có tiếng trong giới chuyên môn về quy hoạch với hàng loạt chuơng trình nói chuyện và những bài báo trên Tạp Chí Quy hoạch hàng tháng. Hai con ngưòi đó cũng nuôi đuợc một ngưòi con nhận học bổng Fulbright của chính phủ Mỹ cho 2 năm thạc sỹ về đô thị học. Tôi chợt nhớ khoảng 5-6 năm truớc ,anh trai tôi từng phỏng vấn một ngưòi đạp xích lô nuôi con đạt huy chuơng vàng Olympic quốc tế và sau này trở thành tiến sỹ tại Mỹ. Huân huy chưong nào cho mẹ, cho cha? Tôi xin kết thúc bằng tiêu đề của một bài báo trên Hoa học trò một vài năm truớc. Cha mẹ tôi dù không phải bác sĩ tiến sỹ thạc sĩ giáo sư, nhưng tôi xin tặng hai ngưòi huân chương cha mẹ anh hùng. Cám ơn hai nguời đã có những niềm đam mê lớn và sự tận tuỵ dành cho con cái mặc dù bao trăn trở cuộc đời. Và cũng xin cám ơn bao ông bố bà mẹ khác trên cuộc đời này đang làm những điều tưong tự.

Arizona, 27/3/2010.

When you are in love, yọu write love letters...

2010-01-26T19:30:00.000-07:00

I just realized one thing: admission essay is just like love letter.

I’m in love.

When I’m in love and want to let that special person knows, I write love letters.

Then my admission essay is love letter.

I don’t know if I should consider Brown as a lady or a gentleman. If it is a lady, it is be the most beautiful lady that comes from a noble family called Ivy league, the most liberal and innovated person among her brothers and sisters. It’s the lady that doesn’t hesitate to express its feeling and ideas bravely, a lady who stands up for herself but also hides her blushes in front of a lovely man.

Brown can also be a gentleman, a manly one who always wears luxurious suits that make people aware of his nobility, There are stereotype about him: cold-hearted, serious, genius, workaholic,,,as the way people look at his brothers Harvard, Yale… But he’s the most charming brother, friendliest, humorous and warm. He makes people sit together and share the feelings and love. Ladies who don’t dare to come out of the stereotype fog will lose the chance to be with him. They hesitate to send him love letters. Some try to be a different person through the letter, then end up finding out he doesn’t love the real them.

Now I realize that Brown appeal more like a gentleman to me. I won’t write anonymous letters because I want him to recognize me. I will let him know that I’m madly in love with him by spending time wandering around his Rhodes Island to get to know him. I will be just me in the letters I send him because I want him to desire me, not a woman who I try to be. I will express my deep emotion, my commitment and my genuine feeling for him. I will make him happy and I know we are just meant to be together.

This time next year, when I send my love letter for him, he will go find me, give me a kiss on my forehead and welcome me to his world. I belong to him.

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

2010-01-25T15:45:00.000-07:00

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers

By William Deresiewicz

It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.

It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy. As two dozen years at Yale and Columbia have shown me, elite colleges relentlessly encourage their students to flatter themselves for being there, and for what being there can do for them. The advantages of an elite education are indeed undeniable. You learn to think, at least in certain ways, and you make the contacts needed to launch yourself into a life rich in all of society’s most cherished rewards. To consider that while some opportunities are being created, others are being cancelled and that while some abilities are being developed, others are being crippled is, within this context, not only outrageous, but inconceivable.

I’m not talking about curricula or the culture wars, the closing or opening of the American mind, political correctness, canon formation, or what have you. I’m talking about the whole system in which these skirmishes play out. Not just the Ivy League and its peer institutions, but also the mechanisms that get you there in the first place: the private and affluent public “feeder” schools, the ever-growing parastructure of tutors and test-prep courses and enrichment programs, the whole admissions frenzy and everything that leads up to and away from it. The message, as always, is the medium. Before, after, and around the elite college classroom, a constellation of values is ceaselessly inculcated. As globalization sharpens economic insecurity, we are increasingly committing ourselves—as students, as parents, as a society—to a vast apparatus of educational advantage. With so many resources devoted to the business of elite academics and so many people scrambling for the limited space at the top of the ladder, it is worth asking what exactly it is you get in the end—what it is we all get, because the elite students of today, as their institutions never tire of reminding them, are the leaders of tomorrow.

The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homogeneous. Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals. At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it. Witness the last two Democratic presidential nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry: one each from Harvard and Yale, both earnest, decent, intelligent men, both utterly incapable of communicating with the larger electorate.

But it isn’t just a matter of class. My education taught me to believe that people who didn’t go to an Ivy League or equivalent school weren’t worth talking to, regardless of their class. I was given the unmistakable message that such people were beneath me. We were “the best and the brightest,” as these places love to say, and everyone else was, well, something else: less good, less bright. I learned to give that little nod of understanding, that slightly sympathetic “Oh,” when people told me they went to a less prestigious college. (If I’d gone to Harvard, I would have learned to say “in Boston” when I was asked where I went to school—the Cambridge version of noblesse oblige.) I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to elite colleges, often precisely for reasons of class. I never learned that there are smart people who don’t go to college at all.

I also never learned that there are smart people who aren’t “smart.” The existence of multiple forms of intelligence has become a commonplace, but however much elite universities like to sprinkle their incoming classes with a few actors or violinists, they select for and develop one form of intelligence: the analytic. While this is broadly true of all universities, elite schools, precisely because their students (and faculty, and administrators) possess this one form of intelligence to such a high degree, are more apt to ignore the value of others. One naturally prizes what one most possesses and what most makes for one’s advantages. But social intelligence and emotional intelligence and creative ability, to name just three other forms, are not distributed preferentially among the educational elite. The “best” are the brightest only in one narrow sense. One needs to wander away from the educational elite to begin to discover this.

What about people who aren’t bright in any sense? I have a friend who went to an Ivy League college after graduating from a typically mediocre public high school. One of the values of going to such a school, she once said, is that it teaches you to relate to stupid people. Some people are smart in the elite-college way, some are smart in other ways, and some aren’t smart at all. It should be embarrassing not to know how to talk to any of them, if only because talking to people is the only real way of knowing them. Elite institutions are supposed to provide a humanistic education, but the first principle of humanism is Terence’s: “nothing human is alien to me.” The first disadvantage of an elite education is how very much of the human it alienates you from.

The second disadvantage, implicit in what I’ve been saying, is that an elite education inculcates a false sense of self-worth. Getting to an elite college, being at an elite college, and going on from an elite college—all involve numerical rankings: SAT, GPA, GRE. You learn to think of yourself in terms of those numbers. They come to signify not only your fate, but your identity; not only your identity, but your value. It’s been said that what those tests really measure is your ability to take tests, but even if they measure something real, it is only a small slice of the real. The problem begins when students are encouraged to forget this truth, when academic excellence becomes excellence in some absolute sense, when “better at X” becomes simply “better.”

There is nothing wrong with taking pride in one’s intellect or knowledge. There is something wrong with the smugness and self-congratulation that elite schools connive at from the moment the fat envelopes come in the mail. From orientation to graduation, the message is implicit in every tone of voice and tilt of the head, every old-school tradition, every article in the student paper, every speech from the dean. The message is: You have arrived. Welcome to the club. And the corollary is equally clear: You deserve everything your presence here is going to enable you to get. When people say that students at elite schools have a strong sense of entitlement, they mean that those students think they deserve more than other people because their SAT scores are higher.

At Yale, and no doubt at other places, the message is reinforced in embarrassingly literal terms. The physical form of the university—its quads and residential colleges, with their Gothic stone façades and wrought-iron portals—is constituted by the locked gate set into the encircling wall. Everyone carries around an ID card that determines which gates they can enter. The gate, in other words, is a kind of governing metaphor—because the social form of the university, as is true of every elite school, is constituted the same way. Elite colleges are walled domains guarded by locked gates, with admission granted only to the elect. The aptitude with which students absorb this lesson is demonstrated by the avidity with which they erect still more gates within those gates, special realms of ever-greater exclusivity—at Yale, the famous secret societies, or as they should probably be called, the open-secret societies, since true secrecy would defeat their purpose. There’s no point in excluding people unless they know they’ve been excluded.

One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense. But they’re not. Graduates of elite schools are not more valuable than stupid people, or talentless people, or even lazy people. Their pain does not hurt more. Their souls do not weigh more. If I were religious, I would say, God does not love them more. The political implications should be clear. As John Ruskin told an older elite, grabbing what you can get isn’t any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists. “Work must always be,” Ruskin says, “and captains of work must always be….[But] there is a wide difference between being captains…of work, and taking the profits of it.”

The political implications don’t stop there. An elite education not only ushers you into the upper classes; it trains you for the life you will lead once you get there. I didn’t understand this until I began comparing my experience, and even more, my students’ experience, with the experience of a friend of mine who went to Cleveland State. There are due dates and attendance requirements at places like Yale, but no one takes them very seriously. Extensions are available for the asking; threats to deduct credit for missed classes are rarely, if ever, carried out. In other words, students at places like Yale get an endless string of second chances. Not so at places like Cleveland State. My friend once got a D in a class in which she’d been running an A because she was coming off a waitressing shift and had to hand in her term paper an hour late.

That may be an extreme example, but it is unthinkable at an elite school. Just as unthinkably, she had no one to appeal to. Students at places like Cleveland State, unlike those at places like Yale, don’t have a platoon of advisers and tutors and deans to write out excuses for late work, give them extra help when they need it, pick them up when they fall down. They get their education wholesale, from an indifferent bureaucracy; it’s not handed to them in individually wrapped packages by smiling clerks. There are few, if any, opportunities for the kind of contacts I saw my students get routinely—classes with visiting power brokers, dinners with foreign dignitaries. There are also few, if any, of the kind of special funds that, at places like Yale, are available in profusion: travel stipends, research fellowships, performance grants. Each year, my department at Yale awards dozens of cash prizes for everything from freshman essays to senior projects. This year, those awards came to more than $90,000—in just one department.

Students at places like Cleveland State also don’t get A-’s just for doing the work. There’s been a lot of handwringing lately over grade inflation, and it is a scandal, but the most scandalous thing about it is how uneven it’s been. Forty years ago, the average GPA at both public and private universities was about 2.6, still close to the traditional B-/C+ curve. Since then, it’s gone up everywhere, but not by anything like the same amount. The average gpa at public universities is now about 3.0, a B; at private universities it’s about 3.3, just short of a B+. And at most Ivy League schools, it’s closer to 3.4. But there are always students who don’t do the work, or who are taking a class far outside their field (for fun or to fulfill a requirement), or who aren’t up to standard to begin with (athletes, legacies). At a school like Yale, students who come to class and work hard expect nothing less than an A-. And most of the time, they get it.

In short, the way students are treated in college trains them for the social position they will occupy once they get out. At schools like Cleveland State, they’re being trained for positions somewhere in the middle of the class system, in the depths of one bureaucracy or another. They’re being conditioned for lives with few second chances, no extensions, little support, narrow opportunity—lives of subordination, supervision, and control, lives of deadlines, not guidelines. At places like Yale, of course, it’s the reverse. The elite like to think of themselves as belonging to a meritocracy, but that’s true only up to a point. Getting through the gate is very difficult, but once you’re in, there’s almost nothing you can do to get kicked out. Not the most abject academic failure, not the most heinous act of plagiarism, not even threatening a fellow student with bodily harm—I’ve heard of all three—will get you expelled. The feeling is that, by gosh, it just wouldn’t be fair—in other words, the self-protectiveness of the old-boy network, even if it now includes girls. Elite schools nurture excellence, but they also nurture what a former Yale graduate student I know calls “entitled mediocrity.” A is the mark of excellence; A- is the mark of entitled mediocrity. It’s another one of those metaphors, not so much a grade as a promise. It means, don’t worry, we’ll take care of you. You may not be all that good, but you’re good enough.

Here, too, college reflects the way things work in the adult world (unless it’s the other way around). For the elite, there’s always another extension—a bailout, a pardon, a stint in rehab—always plenty of contacts and special stipends—the country club, the conference, the year-end bonus, the dividend. If Al Gore and John Kerry represent one of the characteristic products of an elite education, George W. Bush represents another. It’s no coincidence that our current president, the apotheosis of entitled mediocrity, went to Yale. Entitled mediocrity is indeed the operating principle of his administration, but as Enron and WorldCom and the other scandals of the dot-com meltdown demonstrated, it’s also the operating principle of corporate America. The fat salaries paid to underperforming CEOs are an adult version of the A-. Anyone who remembers the injured sanctimony with which Kenneth Lay greeted the notion that he should be held accountable for his actions will understand the mentality in question—the belief that once you’re in the club, you’ve got a God-given right to stay in the club. But you don’t need to remember Ken Lay, because the whole dynamic played out again last year in the case of Scooter Libby, another Yale man.

If one of the disadvantages of an elite education is the temptation it offers to mediocrity, another is the temptation it offers to security. When parents explain why they work so hard to give their children the best possible education, they invariably say it is because of the opportunities it opens up. But what of the opportunities it shuts down? An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist—that is, by any reasonable definition of comfort. You have to live in an ordinary house instead of an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Barbados or Paris, but what are such losses when set against the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you’re suited for, work you love, every day of your life?

Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your true calling.

This is not to say that students from elite colleges never pursue a riskier or less lucrative course after graduation, but even when they do, they tend to give up more quickly than others. (Let’s not even talk about the possibility of kids from privileged backgrounds not going to college at all, or delaying matriculation for several years, because however appropriate such choices might sometimes be, our rigid educational mentality places them outside the universe of possibility—the reason so many kids go sleepwalking off to college with no idea what they’re doing there.) This doesn’t seem to make sense, especially since students from elite schools tend to graduate with less debt and are more likely to be able to float by on family money for a while. I wasn’t aware of the phenomenon myself until I heard about it from a couple of graduate students in my department, one from Yale, one from Harvard. They were talking about trying to write poetry, how friends of theirs from college called it quits within a year or two while people they know from less prestigious schools are still at it. Why should this be? Because students from elite schools expect success, and expect it now. They have, by definition, never experienced anything else, and their sense of self has been built around their ability to succeed. The idea of not being successful terrifies them, disorients them, defeats them. They’ve been driven their whole lives by a fear of failure—often, in the first instance, by their parents’ fear of failure. The first time I blew a test, I walked out of the room feeling like I no longer knew who I was. The second time, it was easier; I had started to learn that failure isn’t the end of the world.

But if you’re afraid to fail, you’re afraid to take risks, which begins to explain the final and most damning disadvantage of an elite education: that it is profoundly anti-intellectual. This will seem counterintuitive. Aren’t kids at elite schools the smartest ones around, at least in the narrow academic sense? Don’t they work harder than anyone else—indeed, harder than any previous generation? They are. They do. But being an intellectual is not the same as being smart. Being an intellectual means more than doing your homework.

If so few kids come to college understanding this, it is no wonder. They are products of a system that rarely asked them to think about something bigger than the next assignment. The system forgot to teach them, along the way to the prestige admissions and the lucrative jobs, that the most important achievements can’t be measured by a letter or a number or a name. It forgot that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers.

Being an intellectual means, first of all, being passionate about ideas—and not just for the duration of a semester, for the sake of pleasing the teacher, or for getting a good grade. A friend who teaches at the University of Connecticut once complained to me that his students don’t think for themselves. Well, I said, Yale students think for themselves, but only because they know we want them to. I’ve had many wonderful students at Yale and Columbia, bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it’s been a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them have seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Only a small minority have seen their education as part of a larger intellectual journey, have approached the work of the mind with a pilgrim soul. These few have tended to feel like freaks, not least because they get so little support from the university itself. Places like Yale, as one of them put it to me, are not conducive to searchers.

Places like Yale are simply not set up to help students ask the big questions. I don’t think there ever was a golden age of intellectualism in the American university, but in the 19th century students might at least have had a chance to hear such questions raised in chapel or in the literary societies and debating clubs that flourished on campus. Throughout much of the 20th century, with the growth of the humanistic ideal in American colleges, students might have encountered the big questions in the classrooms of professors possessed of a strong sense of pedagogic mission. Teachers like that still exist in this country, but the increasingly dire exigencies of academic professionalization have made them all but extinct at elite universities. Professors at top research institutions are valued exclusively for the quality of their scholarly work; time spent on teaching is time lost. If students want a conversion experience, they’re better off at a liberal arts college.

When elite universities boast that they teach their students how to think, they mean that they teach them the analytic and rhetorical skills necessary for success in law or medicine or science or business. But a humanistic education is supposed to mean something more than that, as universities still dimly feel. So when students get to college, they hear a couple of speeches telling them to ask the big questions, and when they graduate, they hear a couple more speeches telling them to ask the big questions. And in between, they spend four years taking courses that train them to ask the little questions—specialized courses, taught by specialized professors, aimed at specialized students. Although the notion of breadth is implicit in the very idea of a liberal arts education, the admissions process increasingly selects for kids who have already begun to think of themselves in specialized terms—the junior journalist, the budding astronomer, the language prodigy. We are slouching, even at elite schools, toward a glorified form of vocational training.

Indeed, that seems to be exactly what those schools want. There’s a reason elite schools speak of training leaders, not thinkers—holders of power, not its critics. An independent mind is independent of all allegiances, and elite schools, which get a large percentage of their budget from alumni giving, are strongly invested in fostering institutional loyalty. As another friend, a third-generation Yalie, says, the purpose of Yale College is to manufacture Yale alumni. Of course, for the system to work, those alumni need money. At Yale, the long-term drift of students away from majors in the humanities and basic sciences toward more practical ones like computer science and economics has been abetted by administrative indifference. The college career office has little to say to students not interested in law, medicine, or business, and elite universities are not going to do anything to discourage the large percentage of their graduates who take their degrees to Wall Street. In fact, they’re showing them the way. The liberal arts university is becoming the corporate university, its center of gravity shifting to technical fields where scholarly expertise can be parlayed into lucrative business opportunities.

It’s no wonder that the few students who are passionate about ideas find themselves feeling isolated and confused. I was talking with one of them last year about his interest in the German Romantic idea of bildung, the upbuilding of the soul. But, he said—he was a senior at the time—it’s hard to build your soul when everyone around you is trying to sell theirs.

Yet there is a dimension of the intellectual life that lies above the passion for ideas, though so thoroughly has our culture been sanitized of it that it is hardly surprising if it was beyond the reach of even my most alert students. Since the idea of the intellectual emerged in the 18th century, it has had, at its core, a commitment to social transformation. Being an intellectual means thinking your way toward a vision of the good society and then trying to realize that vision by speaking truth to power. It means going into spiritual exile. It means foreswearing your allegiance, in lonely freedom, to God, to country, and to Yale. It takes more than just intellect; it takes imagination and courage. “I am not afraid to make a mistake,” Stephen Dedalus says, “even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake, and perhaps as long as eternity, too.”

Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them. But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system, so it’s almost impossible for them to see outside it, to see that it’s even there. Long before they got to college, they turned themselves into world-class hoop-jumpers and teacher-pleasers, getting A’s in every class no matter how boring they found the teacher or how pointless the subject, racking up eight or 10 extracurricular activities no matter what else they wanted to do with their time. Paradoxically, the situation may be better at second-tier schools and, in particular, again, at liberal arts colleges than at the most prestigious universities. Some students end up at second-tier schools because they’re exactly like students at Harvard or Yale, only less gifted or driven. But others end up there because they have a more independent spirit. They didn’t get straight A’s because they couldn’t be bothered to give everything in every class. They concentrated on the ones that meant the most to them or on a single strong extracurricular passion or on projects that had nothing to do with school or even with looking good on a college application. Maybe they just sat in their room, reading a lot and writing in their journal. These are the kinds of kids who are likely, once they get to college, to be more interested in the human spirit than in school spirit, and to think about leaving college bearing questions, not resumés.

I’ve been struck, during my time at Yale, by how similar everyone looks. You hardly see any hippies or punks or art-school types, and at a college that was known in the ’80s as the Gay Ivy, few out lesbians and no gender queers. The geeks don’t look all that geeky; the fashionable kids go in for understated elegance. Thirty-two flavors, all of them vanilla. The most elite schools have become places of a narrow and suffocating normalcy. Everyone feels pressure to maintain the kind of appearance—and affect—that go with achievement. (Dress for success, medicate for success.) I know from long experience as an adviser that not every Yale student is appropriate and well-adjusted, which is exactly why it worries me that so many of them act that way. The tyranny of the normal must be very heavy in their lives. One consequence is that those who can’t get with the program (and they tend to be students from poorer backgrounds) often polarize in the opposite direction, flying off into extremes of disaffection and self-destruction. But another consequence has to do with the large majority who can get with the program.

I taught a class several years ago on the literature of friendship. One day we were discussing Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves, which follows a group of friends from childhood to middle age. In high school, one of them falls in love with another boy. He thinks, “To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?…There is nobody—here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone.” A pretty good description of an elite college campus, including the part about never being allowed to feel alone. What did my students think of this, I wanted to know? What does it mean to go to school at a place where you’re never alone? Well, one of them said, I do feel uncomfortable sitting in my room by myself. Even when I have to write a paper, I do it at a friend’s. That same day, as it happened, another student gave a presentation on Emerson’s essay on friendship. Emerson says, he reported, that one of the purposes of friendship is to equip you for solitude. As I was asking my students what they thought that meant, one of them interrupted to say, wait a second, why do you need solitude in the first place? What can you do by yourself that you can’t do with a friend?

So there they were: one young person who had lost the capacity for solitude and another who couldn’t see the point of it. There’s been much talk of late about the loss of privacy, but equally calamitous is its corollary, the loss of solitude. It used to be that you couldn’t always get together with your friends even when you wanted to. Now that students are in constant electronic contact, they never have trouble finding each other. But it’s not as if their compulsive sociability is enabling them to develop deep friendships. “To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?”: my student was in her friend’s room writing a paper, not having a heart-to-heart. She probably didn’t have the time; indeed, other students told me they found their peers too busy for intimacy.

What happens when busyness and sociability leave no room for solitude? The ability to engage in introspection, I put it to my students that day, is the essential precondition for living an intellectual life, and the essential precondition for introspection is solitude. They took this in for a second, and then one of them said, with a dawning sense of self-awareness, “So are you saying that we’re all just, like, really excellent sheep?” Well, I don’t know. But I do know that the life of the mind is lived one mind at a time: one solitary, skeptical, resistant mind at a time. The best place to cultivate it is not within an educational system whose real purpose is to reproduce the class system.

The world that produced John Kerry and George Bush is indeed giving us our next generation of leaders. The kid who’s loading up on AP courses junior year or editing three campus publications while double-majoring, the kid whom everyone wants at their college or law school but no one wants in their classroom, the kid who doesn’t have a minute to breathe, let alone think, will soon be running a corporation or an institution or a government. She will have many achievements but little experience, great success but no vision. The disadvantage of an elite education is that it’s given us the elite we have, and the elite we’re going to have.

http://www.theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite-education/

Dream

2010-01-08T13:59:00.000-07:00

I was a little girl alone in my little world who dreamed of a little home for me.
I played pretend between the trees, and fed my houseguests bark and leaves, and laughed in my pretty bed of green.

I had a dream
That I could fly from the highest swing.
I had a dream.

Long walks in the dark through woods grown behind the park, I asked God who I'm supposed to be.
The stars smiled down on me, God answered in silent reverie. I said a prayer and fell asleep.

I had a dream
That I could fly from the highest tree.
I had a dream.

Now I'm old and feeling grey.

I don't know what's left to say about this life I'm willing to leave.
I lived it full and I lived it well, there's many tales I've lived to tell.

I'm ready now, I'm ready now, I'm ready now to fly from the highest wing.

I had a dream

Giang fighting!!!!

2010-01-05T20:48:00.000-07:00

Có những lúc tôi cảm thấy trống rỗng và xa xôi, nhìn thấy những việc cần làm mà không biết phải bắt đầu từ đâu và không biết có làm nổi hay không.

Cũng có những lúc tôi cảm thấy như có một ngọn lửa trong con tim, một sự khao khát phải hoàn thành một việc gì đó. Lòng nhiệt huyết đó nhiều lúc làm tôi thao thức trong đêm, lo lắng sớ sẽ gục ngã giữa đường.

Tối hôm nay chỉ là một buổi tối rất bình thường, bình thường với cái nghĩa là vẫn khó tập trung làm bài như những buổi tối những ngày gần hết kỳ nghỉ đông và trở lại trường. Tôi lên facebook, lướt qua ảnh của bạn bè đang ở lại VN, viết vài dòng vu vơ và rồi cũng không hiểu vì sao, bây giờ trước mặt tôi là album ảnh "start of something new" về những ngày đầu tới đại học Brown của chị Ngọc Linh Brown'13. Tôi nhìn Van Wickle Gate - cảnh cổng mà một năm chỉ mở hai lần - 1 lần cho sinh viên năm 1 và 1 lần cho sinh viên năm cuối tốt nghiệp. Tôi ước mình sẽ được bước châm qua cánh cổng đó, và sẽ bước ra từ cánh cổng đó với tấm bằng tốt nghiệp trên tay.

Trong lúc này đâu, nhìn cánh cổng này mà tôi thấy xao xuyến lạ thường. Tôi không có cái cảm giác rụt rè trước một ước mơ quá xa xôi, cũng không phải là cảm giác quá là tự tin một cách ngạo mạn rằng mình sẽ bước chân qua cánh cổng này một cách dễ dàng. Tôi chỉ hỏi rằng tôi đang ở đâu trên thế giới của tôi - thế giới bao gồm chính bản thân và những người đồng trang lứa. Có một người đã bảo với tôi rằng" điều thú vị nhất của cuộc sống chính là tìm hiểu xem mình đang đứng ở vị trí nào". Nếu đúng như vậy, thì cuộc sống thú vị từ những thử thách, những khó khăn để khẳng định chính bản thân mình, thú vị nhờ những phản hồi mà mình nhận được từ những người xung quang, thú vị từ những bước tiến bước lùi bất ngờ hay sao?

Tôi ơi, hãy cố lên. Hãy nhớ những phút giây ngồi ngắm ảnh Brown và ước mình một ngày sẽ được ngằm bình minh Providence từ cửa sổ ký túc xá, ước sẽ được ngồi trên bãi cỏ kia, bước chân và nghe tiếng xào xạo từ những chiếc lá vàng (may mắn thay ) được rụng trong khuôn viên trường, hay chỉ đơn giản nhất là laptop sẽ connect vào wifi của Brown và tôi sẽ tự hào đặt network đó là HOME của mình...

Trong tương lai gần, hãy ước rằng tháng 11 tới sẽ phỏng vấn thành công ở Brown và một ngày đầu tháng 12 sẽ hét ầm lên và nhảy như một con hâm theo bài shake it của Metro station khi nhận được thư trúng tuyển ED của ngôi trường này. Khi đó thì mọi gắng nặng trên vai sẽ tự nhẹ bớt và tôi sẽ quay trở về quán cafe quen ở phố cổ và nhâm nhi một cốc sinh tố dưa hấu bơ quen thuộc với nụ cười mãn nguyện cho một năm tuyệt vời.

Giang fighting!!!

2009-12-30T00:17:00.001-07:00