a story in progress

1. Time will zoom by without you realizing.It has been 4 years since you last left your hometown to pursue your own adventure but you have also learnt and met many people along the way. Those experiences are a lifetime worth of stories. So cherish them.
2. You will lose touch with your friends. As your Facebook friends and phonebook increase by the day you will also find yourself being disconnected from a lot of people. It's expected as you are still undergoing major changes - personally and professionally. You will feel bad about it. You will reminisce about the heydays. But know that at times, these people are also just a call or a message away. Use them wisely.
3. As you age by the day, you are starting to find yourself valuing companionship on a higher level; may it be friends or loved ones. You need someone to fill up those time when you are off from work or lessons at school. You derive satisfaction from organizing or attending social events while frowning at yourself for the lack of "happenings" in your life. It's alright to be busy socially but keep those alone time available too. You will be needing it.
4. You will see and experience your parents aging. They will be older each time you are back home. With new facial lines and less robustness than previously remembered, you will be silent for words. It will hit you that the dynamics between you and your parents are changing. You are no longer the receiving end in the relationship. You are starting to realize that you have to give back; may it be in terms of effort, wisdom or even financial support. It scares the living shit out of you to think that they will not always be there for you. There is nothing you can do about that but to call them more often and make it a point to shower them with the same love or kindness shown previously.
5. Comparing and contrasting will always be on your mind. You may compare your grades on one instance. The next you will find youself contrasting with the wealth you have as compared to the others. In fact you will come to a realization that everything and anything is up on the pedestal, ready to be benchmarked with another. Wealth, relationship, success, performance, looks and whatever things that you can name. This can be a powerful motivation or a goalset for you to achieve in your own lifetime but do not let it consume you. By all means pursue it as hard as possible but do not beat yourself too much if you fall short of achieveing it. Somethings are just not worth it and you wouldn't realize it back then.
6. Freedom is overrated. Being free from parental control as well as doing "adult things" are often overvalued in significance and miscalculated in terms of payoff. Yes you have the money to splurge. You may not even have a curfew hour. But you are also hit with the need to be responsible for your own financing and decisions. Your actions or inactions will bear a greater significance with each growing day. You can no longer claim that you are still learning or that you didn't know about it previously. It is now your responsibility to find out how your are covered medically or the sort of people that you are currently involved with. Be prudent and keep your head at where it should be.
7. Appreciate yourself more. Inflate your own ego now and then. You are at this incredible age where you are still growing and maturing to a fine adult. Revel in your own health and looks. Cause you know you can still ride on your metabolism to compensate for all the food and unhealthy lifestyle that you have been living by. So cut yourself some slack.
8. You will be haunted by your own doubts and skepticism. You will question the decisions that you are either going to make or have made it in the past. You will never feel 100% certain that you are in the right place and time with the right people. Let bygone be bygone. No amount of thinking can reverse past choices but you can definitely make a consicous decision to get the 100% from what you are doing or living at this moment in time.
9. You will experience awe and disapointment with those around you. Some may turn out to be completely different from what you first perceive. It can be for the better or for the worse. But there are also some people who will never change no matter how much hope you against hope that they will. Leave these people alone but do not let them stop you from dealing with others.
10. Be wild and spontaneous. No matter how you look at things, you are still young with minimal baggages in life still. Do that one thing that you have always thought of doing. Too expensive, too out-of-reach? Start with the small things then and work your way up of the bucket list. You are too precious to live by the will and expectation of others. 

In the past I used to find airports as a highly oyxmoronic term. It was joyful in the arrival halls with sights of reunion and hugging galore. It was also depressing with scenes of goodbye, unspoken worries and reservations. Dabbled with the occasional tears and high display of emotions, airports used to be those places that I want to avoid as much as possible.

Smooth; mocha smooth. Sniped from wifly72

However after the umpteenth visit to the airport, whether it was to send people off, to receive people or to travel myself, I am starting to appreciate the smooth, coolness of an airport. I no longer associate airports as this place of farewells and welcomes melding together. Instead, it's professionally  cool. It mostly well run with a likeable efficiency rate (minus those anonying travellers - you know what I mean). You can find yourself amid a busy terminal yet comfortably alone (so long as you are not lost).

I see in the excited faces of those on-boardees, myself being equally excited about the prospect of leaving a particular spot to travel to somewhere else. May it be home or some unknown land, that felling is so universally relate-able yet personal for each traveller. I share their concerns of the work or connections that they are about to leave behind. Expecting to come back to a pile of backlog or worse - nothing has changed for them.

I may have just gotten back from the airport after again the umpteenth times of seeing someone off, but I do know that I am pretty excited about my next visit to there. For it will be my turn to go through those departure halls and live through the other spectrum of flight and familarity once more.

I am having control. Or semblence of it at the very least. I now live by a routine. I sleep on time, wake up on time. On a good day I am even getting my work cleared from that list-of-to-do found either in some Post-it or G Cal.

It sure feels that way! - Snipped from Cuba Gallery

Come back a month ago, and I would tell myself this is exactly what I want for my summer. I needed that sense of confirmity so badly. For being in a limbo of not knowing how I was to spend most of my summer wasn't a cool prospect. In fact it was bad. For being jobless is so out of fashion these days especially among aspiring undergrads that I would have killed myself for commit the biggest faux of the year as an undergrad if I did not secure that one job for myself.

So now I am having a good laugh at myself. Or rather at my one month younger self. I would have told him to be less moppy about the uncertainity then. To soak up the random, unstructured way of living. May it be sleeping at really odd hours of the day or pumping ounces of coffee into the system.

After all things did turn out fine in the end. Time to live the moments and do something meaningful with them.

1. Your friends will change a lot over the next four years. Let them.
2. Call someone you love back home a few times a week, even if just for a few minutes.
3. In college more than ever before, songs will attach themselves to memories. Every month or two, make a mix cd, mp3 folder, whatever - just make sure you keep copies of these songs. Ten years out, they'll be as effective as a journal in taking you back to your favorite moments.
4. Take naps in the middle of the afternoon with reckless abandon.
5. Adjust your schedule around when you are most productive and creative. If you're nocturnal and do your best work late at night, embrace that. It may be the only time in your life when you can.
6. If you write your best papers the night before they are due, don't let people tell you that you "should be more organized" or that you "should plan better." Different things work for different people. Personally, I worked best under pressure - so I always procrastinated... and always kicked ass (which annoyed my friends to no end). ;-) Use the freedom that comes with not having grades first semester to experiment and see what works best for you.
7. At least a few times in your college career, do something fun and irresponsible when you should be studying. The night before my freshman year psych final, my roommate somehow scored front row seats to the Indigo Girls at a venue 2 hours away. I didn't do so well on the final, but I haven't thought about psych since 1993. I've thought about the experience of going to that show (with the guy who is now my son's godfather) at least once a month ever since.
8. Become friends with your favorite professors. Recognize that they can learn from you too - in fact, that's part of the reason they chose to be professors.
9. Carve out an hour every single day to be alone. (Sleeping doesn't count.)
10. Go on dates. Don't feel like every date has to turn into a relationship.
11. Don't date someone your roommate has been in a relationship with.
12. When your friends' parents visit, include them. You'll get free food, etc., and you'll help them to feel like they're cool, hangin' with the hip college kids.
13. In the first month of college, send a hand-written letter to someone who made college possible for you and describe your adventures thus far. It will mean a lot to him/her now, and it will mean a lot to you in ten years when he/she shows it to you.
14. Embrace the differences between you and your classmates. Always be asking yourself, "what can I learn from this person?" More of your education will come from this than from any classroom.
15. All-nighters are entirely overrated.
16. For those of you who have come to college in a long-distance relationship with someone from high school: despite what many will tell you, it can work. The key is to not let your relationship interfere with your college experience. If you don't want to date anyone else, that's totally fine! What's not fine, however, is missing out on a lot of defining experiences because you're on the phone with your boyfriend/girlfriend for three hours every day.
17. Working things out between friends is best done in person, not over email. (IM does not count as "in person.") Often someone's facial expressions will tell you more than his/her words.
18. Take risks.
19. Don't be afraid of (or excited by) the co-ed bathrooms. The thrill is over in about 2 seconds.
20. Wednesday is the middle of the week; therefore on wednesday night the week is more than half over. You should celebrate accordingly. (It makes thursday and friday a lot more fun.)
21. Welcome failure into your lives. It's how we grow. What matters is not that you failed, but that you recovered.
22. Take some classes that have nothing to do with your major(s), purely for the fun of it.
23. It's important to think about the future, but it's more important to be present in the now. You won't get the most out of college if you think of it as a stepping stone.
24. When you're living on a college campus with 400 things going on every second of every day, watching TV is pretty much a waste of your time and a waste of your parents' money. If you're going to watch, watch with friends so at least you can call it a "valuable social experience."
25. Don't be afraid to fall in love. When it happens, don't take it for granted. Celebrate it, but don't let it define your college experience.
26. Much of the time you once had for pleasure reading is going to disappear. Keep a list of the books you would have read had you had the time, so that you can start reading them when you graduate.
27. Things that seem like the end of the world really do become funny with a little time and distance. Knowing this, forget the embarassment and skip to the good part.
28. Every once in awhile, there will come an especially powerful moment when you can actually feel that an experience has changed who you are. Embrace these, even if they are painful.
29. No matter what your political or religious beliefs, be open-minded. You're going to be challenged over the next four years in ways you can't imagine, across all fronts. You can't learn if you're closed off.
30. If you need to get a job, find something that you actually enjoy. Just because it's work doesn't mean it has to suck.
31. Don't always lead. It's good to follow sometimes.
32. Take a lot of pictures. One of my major regrets in life is that I didn't take more pictures in college. My excuse was the cost of film and processing. Digital cameras are cheap and you have plenty of hard drive space, so you have no excuse.
33. Your health and safety are more important than anything.
34. Ask for help. Often.
35. Half of you will be in the bottom half of your class at any given moment. Way more than half of you will be in the bottom half of your class at some point in the next four years. Get used to it.
36. In ten years very few of you will look as good as you do right now, so secretly revel in how hot you are before it's too late.
37. In the long run, where you go to college doesn't matter as much as what you do with the opportunities you're given there. The MIT name on your resume won't mean much if that's the only thing on your resume. As a student here, you will have access to a variety of unique opportunities that no one else will ever have - don't waste them.
38. On the flip side, don't try to do everything. Balance = well-being.
39. Make perspective a priority. If you're too close to something to have good perspective, rely on your friends to help you.
40. Eat badly sometimes. It's the last time in your life when you can do this without feeling guilty about it.
41. Make a complete ass of yourself at least once, preferably more. It builds character.
42. Wash your sheets more than once a year. Trust me on this one.
43. If you are in a relationship and none of your friends want to hang out with you and your significant other, pay attention. They usually know better than you do.
44. Don't be afraid of the weird pizza topping combinations that your new friend from across the country loves. Some of the truly awful ones actually taste pretty good. Expand your horizons.
45. Explore the campus thoroughly. Don't get caught.
46. Life is too short to stick with a course of study that you're no longer excited about. Switch, even if it complicates things.
47. Tattoos are permanent. Be very certain.
48. Don't make fun of prefrosh. That was you like 2 hours ago.
49. Enjoy every second of the next four years. It is impossible to describe how quickly they pass.
50. This is the only time in your lives when your only real responsibility is to learn. Try to remember how lucky you are every day.

Swiped from Cuba Gallery

Depending on  who and how you ask; chances are you will end up with a myriad of answers. Some may give you a careful but non-descript answer of "yes, I am." or even a hasty response of "yeah, why do you ask?". But beneath all these answers, therein lie a greater crux of emotions, considerations and perspectives mashed together to arrive at the answer to the question - are you happy?

For example, subject to a person's internal process, one may consider things that are only pertinent to onself when asked. You will most likely be happy if your most dreaded Prof is to suddenly announce the cancellation of a class or that your favourite bubble tea is being given out freely by your school as per its welfare drive. Such internal process may also affect you on a much deeper and foreign level when you find yourself brimming ear to ear after being complimented on a particular subject. At first you may be wondering to yourself why are you even so happy about it in the first place until  that lightbulb in your head goes flashing - this could be the one! the one you fancy.

Alternately, one can also formulate the answer to the above question by manner of comparison. If you are to compare yourself relatively to your peers, you may end up admiring all things awesome that they have had and are currently having. It could be their material possessions, their looks, their future, their attachement with their other halfs and whatnot. Looking from those perspectives you may potentially arrive at the conclusion that perhaps you are indeed happy - relatively in those aspects at least.

But the point remains. 'Tis such a relative and subjective question all together.

1. Managing and impacting my team (in a good way)
2. Exploring the less sexy sounding field of Organizational Behaviour & Human Resource
3. Getting my first taste of financial independence
4.  Being in a relationship

It's physicaly exhausting and mind numbing. Beyond all of that regulation and demands you probably feel like a week old pudding waiting to ooze out of it's hopeless mould. You know this ain't right but you just want to run away from everything if you could. You want to be left to your own device. But you also know it ain't possible at the same time.  

C'est la mort.

Not because you are a hot mess spiralling to self destruction or that you are in some deep trench of life's misery. Rather you are hit with this sudden realization that things can literally happen overnight without you coming to terms with it in the first place. You go to bed feeling contented with what you have had/currently undergoing - only to wake up realizing you are either craving for more or that you have that much riding on you.

Through this, you probably learn that you are no superman masquerading as some average looking joe with a dorky looking glass. You aren't saving anyone at the moment. In fact you feel like you are firefighting each day. Battling the issues and challenges thrown ferociously at you by some unknown villan bidding his time.

At the end of it all, you don't know where this is taking you. But it doesn't matter. Because ultimately, all that matters is to pull yourself together and say bring it on.