Sometimes I wonder how I did some of the things I did when I was younger. How did I live in Boston for almost five years without having air conditioning? How did I live for weeks on nothing but Tang and dumplings? How did I live with roommates? Was that shady hostel in Poland really worth the money saved? How did I manage to fit everything I needed to live into one minivan? How did I fit my life into a dorm room, a room in an apartment, a small 1BR apartment, a larger 1 BR apartment, a 2 BR apartment? How did I manage to pay all of my living expenses for a year based on five hours of work per week? How did I move to Europe with nothing but a few suitcases? How did I get by without a cleaning lady? How was I ever able to live my life more cheaply and with less space than I have now? 

These are all ridiculous questions, but they feel real, especially if I'm not trying to keep things in perspective. Even when I try to keep things in perspective, and even when I'm missing some aspects of my former lives, I'm not sure I could go back to living my former lives the way I lived them at the time. 

And then I wonder if living bigger and more expensively has been a gradual and irreversible mistake -- once you get used to more money, more space, more things, you can never go back without some feeling of inconvenience and hesitation -- and I worry that this means that the road I've taken in the past, the one less traveled by, is a road I'll end up not taking in the future, because I've started living life too easily. Maybe I'll miss out on some unforgettable adventures in the future because I'll be too blindly attached to my couch, my remote control, my refrigerator that automatically dispenses ice cubes. 

They say that nothing is more important than first impressions. 

I'm terrible at pretty much everything about first impressions. (1) I don't give a good first impression (except, for some reason, in job interviews, which I think I'm able to do better than almost anything else, including my actual job), and (2) I am bad at forming accurate first impressions of other people.

The first is due to a combination of being somewhat shy (although you wouldn't necessarily think it, because I overcompensate in other ways), and easily bored, so not only am I bad at small talk, I also can't really pay attention to it. I often end up giving people the impression that I'm either snobby or have Asperger's. This is not the case if I feel like I'm in control of the social situation (usually meaning that it's a very small group, or I know the majority of the people there, or I organized the event), and it's something I'm slowly improving over the years.

The second... I can't really say why the second is true. It's probably partly due to the same reasons that I give bad first impressions. I can't pay attention to an unfamiliar person for very long, because I'm so easily distracted or bored, so I don't absorb much information about them. And even with the information that I do glean and retain, I often misread the cues. I think that people who have the gift of reading others quickly are by nature deeply empathetic, and I just don't have that kind of empathy for people I don't know yet. Add in the fact that I have a terrible memory for faces (and have been known to meet the same person five times without realizing it was the same person), and I might not even be getting any first impressions of people, at all.

It makes me wonder what missed friendships I might have had that have died before being formed, just because I do so badly in first meetings. 

The good news, and I'm so glad there is good news, is that once I do overcome these initial barriers, I think I give my friends a better second (or tenth, however long it ends up taking) impression, and I form better impressions of them, as well, which is a good thing, or I wouldn't have any friends. But it's still somewhat disturbing to think that with almost all of my closest friends, I can recall almost no first impressions, or first impressions that are fundamentally, irreconcilably different than the impressions I have of them now that I know them well, and I think it's pretty likely that their first impressions of me (if any) were not spectacular. It's just by pure luck that we managed to push through to become and stay friends (although I tend to think that my resulting friendships are somehow stronger, due to having survived the poor initial conditions).

Do you remember the book Flowers for Algernon? We read it in junior high, and it's about this mentally handicapped man who goes through an experimental procedure and rapidly becomes a genius, then has to watch as the effects of the procedure wear off, and he reverts, conscious all the while, of his descent back to his previous state.

It's one of those books I refer to a lot in conversation, mostly in a joking way, when talking about things that I used to know or be able to do, that I am no longer able to remember or understand. For instance, reading my college honors thesis for economics and East Asian Studies, which focused on a statistical analysis of a huge data set to extract results about "Migrants, Migration Choice, and Returns to Education in 1980's China," is always a "Flowers for Algernon moment." Did I really write that? Did I know what I was talking about? How did I figure out all the statistics and econometrics? How did I get the statistics program to run the regressions that I wanted to run (and how did I know what regressions I wanted to run in the first place)? How did I know that my results were robust? I can read the thesis now, all 80-some pages of it, but I can't really connect it to much of anything that is still in my brain and in use these days.

Looking back, there are a lot of things I used to be able to do or understand or remember that have just gone their Algernon ways, partly crowded out by other skills or knowledge, but partly just rusted and abandoned on blocks in the overgrown weeds of my mind. Childhood and youth are times of endless expansion, mental frontierism, exploration of new territories, and I think that as a child, I was always very curious, perhaps too curious for my own good. Is that something that we lose as we get older? Do we lose the curiosity itself, or do we lose the time and energy to be curious? Does all the grownup stuff -- commuting, paying bills, buying toilet paper, filing taxes, sorting through junk mail -- replace the pioneering mental adventures we had when we were young?

Just some of the many things (some of which aren't actually skills or knowledge, but whose loss I mourn nonetheless, and have therefore added to the list, despite the fact that they don't really belong on this kind of list) I have lost to the Algernon phenomenon, and the times in which I had them:

• Preschool/kindergarten: The ability to fall asleep easily, and to sleep through the night
• Grade school: The ability to not care what I looked like; the feeling that the days and years stretched on forever, and that they would be full of unbelievable things; the freedom to play with boys without worrying that it might be misinterpreted
• Junior high: The ability to diagram sentences (OK, this one isn't a big loss)
• High school: Calculus; physics; chemistry; gel electrophoresis; being the biggest damn fish in the pond without even trying
• College: Basic reading/writing in Chinese; statistics; econometrics; being able to sight-read and sing like it was my job
• Post-college: Fluency in French
• Law school: The ability to read thousands of pages of dense text in a week and regurgitate it for exams; a sense of where the road was taking me (I can no longer see any road, and mistrust any road I think I might see)
• Real life: Basic German; the ability to sleep for fourteen hours at a time; the ability to face jet lag without severe repercussions

I don't know why I hadn't really thought of this until now, but one of my biggest problems lies in the fact that both of the following are true:

(1) I am frustrated by monotony

(2) I am a creature of habit

I get so annoyed when my life settles into a rut, but I am by nature a rut-settler, and so the only way I can get out of my rut is to go do something new somewhere else for a while, until I find a new rut to settle into. Repeat ad infinitum.

It's quiet on Xanga, and I know that I have been quiet, myself. I've been doing a lot of things, thinking a lot of things, traveling, seeing people,  living life, keeping my public blogs updated, and Xanga just seems to get pushed back. It takes a while to decide what I want to write here, and even when I decide what to write, it's sometimes hard to get it down.

Some recent thoughts:

(1) I just got back from a trip to Z-town to see the old crew, and it's great to drop in on my old life, but hard to accept that it really is part of the past. I miss all of my old lives, and I wonder when I'm going to move on again and then miss this life.

(2) A lot of my friends are going though major life changes: babies, weddings, engagements, new home purchases, and so on. I'm happy for them, but watching them spin their cocoons and get ready for their new lives makes me wonder even more as time goes on if I'm a grasshopper in a world of caterpillars and butterflies. These transformations seem strange and wonderful for them, but they remain completely foreign to me.

(3) My parents and I may never really get it right. I'm too contrary and lacking in self-restraint, and they can't decide if they want to be friends or authority figures, which means that the relationship fails to fit into either mold.  

(4) I love my friends and my friends love me, but I don't think "nice" or "kind" are the first words any of them would use to describe me. Maybe "blunt" or hopefully "faithful," but I've never really been the sweet girl who warms the cockles of everyone's hearts. I tend to say what I think (and sometimes I'll go even further and say things that I don't think, just to make a point) which can cut both ways -- either I'm the person who will save you from doing something really stupid, or I'm the person who will go straight for the kill shot without really thinking. I can see the downside of being so empathy-deficient, but I'm not sure that I can (or necessarily would want to) change it.

(5) It is possible to love your life the way it is and still feel terribly restless and long for violent upheaval and radical change, for no real reason. Things are truly great, but sometimes, I feel like a kid who has painstakingly built the perfect city of blocks, and I just want to go in and knock everything down, just to see what would happen, and how it will look once I redesign and rebuild.

The New York Times gave an update on men's fashion:

"Jean Paul Gaultier’s show, based on the Turkish bath...had the right balance of humor, awareness and up-to-date fashion. Quite a few of the clothes were black and white, and included both tailoring and caftans... Yohji Yamamoto had fun exploring 18th- and 19th-century masculine styles, complete with appropriate facial hair. The collection was actually more contemporary than that might sound, with loose frock coats, muted floral jacquard shorts, and cool, extra-long polo shirts. More of a man dress, really."

I'm not sure I'd be able to keep a straight face if my male friends started showing up in caftans, floral shorts, and man dresses.

In retrospect, the nerdiness that my classmates disparaged and the lack of direction that my parents fretted about were the two main things that led me along the path I've taken, and knowing that gives me more than a small sense of vindication.

I've been thinking about the idea that "the days are long, but the years are short," and how we often become so focused on pushing through our daily routines that we don't notice that our lives are flying by.

With some rounding inaccuracies:

It's been fifteen years since I graduated from high school.

It's been eleven years since I graduated from college.

It's been ten years since I started law school.

It's been nine years since 9/11.

It's been eight years since I got out of the hospital, and since I got my dog.

It's been seven years since I took the Bar Exam.

It's been six years since I moved to Europe.

It's been two years since I moved back.

It's been 20 months since I got together with Superman.

The days are long, but the years are short.

So I've been working a lot lately, trying to close a bunch of deals, with a fair amount of success, actually. In a moment of rather foggy lucidity this morning, I patted myself on the back and thought, "Right on, I close deals like it's my job!" And then I remembered that it is my job, so it's not that impressive...

I was at dinner last night with a couple of friends, and one of them brought up the concept of the six word novel, and how Hemingway came up a great one. We looked it up on our phones at the dinner table to find the exact phrasing ("For sale: baby shoes, never worn."), and some of the related search results mentioned the idea of a six word memoir, and that got us talking. If you had to capture the essence of your life, or at least the most important aspect of your life in six words, what would those six words be?

Based on the examples we found online, the snide, sarcastic, or funny ones were often more communicative than the earnest ones:

"Not quite what I was planning." - Summer Grimes

"Well, I thought I was funny." - Stephen Colbert

"Liars: hysterectomy didn't improve sex life." - Joan Rivers

And as we tried it out, it turns out that it's much easier to write the ones that have a smirk built in. 

My friend came up with: "Pushed his limits. Results decidedly mixed."

Some of mine:

"Pursued reasonable hedonism with minimum harm."

"Persevered through ups, downs, and sideways."

"Loved people, travel, books, and food."

But it's really hard to write a smirk-free memoir in six words, I suppose because first you have to pick a real idea that you want to capture in six words, and second, the idea you're trying to capture is so much more abstract and intangible.

"Kept on moving, no matter what."

"Did what I felt like doing."

It's an interesting exercise, and I keep hoping that if I think about it for a few minutes every so often, maybe I will find a way to sketch out my life in six words. Let me know if you have more luck with this than I've been having so far.