Days just drag by

Guess I'm out of practice now I don't know what to write.

But well.. Bought my one-way ticket for the fall internship in New York city. In about 2 weeks, I'll be flying out. It'll be only 2 months but seems highly likely I'm going to live in at least 4 different places, some crashing included. The New York housing market is the worst I have seen. Everything is going crazy. A decent studio in midtown or some other nice neighborhoods costs about 2,000-3,000 a month, and a one-bedroom definitely more than 3,000. Of course I can't afford that. I asked friends for help. And I got in touch with their friends, and their friends' friends, and so on. It's somewhat a depressing process. It's good to get to know more people, and some of them could potentially be friends. But most of them pointed me to Craigslist which I hadn't had much luck with. At one point, I was thinking, maybe by the time I get to NYC, I might arleady know half its population, and still can't find a place to live!

Things started better from about 2 weeks ago though. Nothing is finalized yet, but seems it'd be difficult for me to be homeless for the entire length of stay. A friend's friend's friend's friend (no kidding!) offered me to stay with her for the first week for free. And I might be able to take care of a woman's cats for the second month and live in her lovely apartment by paying only a fraciton of the rent. But the most part of the first month is still a puzzle unsolved. It's also a much more critical time because it is when my parents are coming to visit and stay with me. I always feel that things work this way, that, I might be very lucky enough to get a cat-sitting job, but it will never be the time I exactly like it to be happening. But of course, if everything happens exactly the way I want them to be, I'd be very scared too. That'd be too artificial, like a plot.

Anyways, other than spending tons of time on housing search, I also ended stopped dating a guy whom I was seeing occasionally. I didn't feel right to keep him there while I'd be gone for 2 months in New York. So I told him, hey, for your own good we should stop seeing each other, before we both get too serious in this. He, as a non-Chinese, didn't understand why I was thinking for him, and hated that I made a decision on his behalf. So it's not necessarily happy. The night we broke up, I was distracted by my own cruelty and forgot to change shoes when I was hitting the gym later. I didn't go back but instead went running in my flip flops. It wasn't too bad because I did it on an elliptical machine. Only a couple blisters.

As to friends, I got to know a few new people throughout the summer. They are all interesting, but I realized two things: (1) the older you get the harder it is to find a good friend - we just become pickier and less tolerant, and maybe, a little more cruel too? (2) I seriously need to make more female friends. Facts are they stay friends with you longer, even after they get committed to a relationship.

Work-wise, OK.

Dissertation-wise, I'm making modest progress, but so far so good.