Author / Halley

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Posts by Halley

I’m the creator of Chiaroscuro, where I write about an array of topics, ranging from philosophy and psychology to fashion and food. Underlying all my interests is my passion for understanding people and how they live. I’m fascinated by the beauty and connections found in everyday life, and my goal is to highlight and share them in personal and meaningful ways.
by Halley

Arriving in London

a quick note before I crash for the night…

The plane ride was shorter than expected, thanks to a helpful tailwind. Got to Heathrow at around 6:20am, local time, and took a train to central london. Made the mistake of paying 10 extra pounds for a non-stop train when there was a slower, but much cheaper one. Oh well. I had a fun time (by fun, i actually mean quite painful, literally) getting all my luggage around the train station. Had the misfortune of getting a grumpy, ill-humoured old man as my taxi driver. The ride from the station to my dorm took another 10 pounds. 

Commonwealth Hall, where I’m staying, is a decent looking dorm. Better than most of the old west campus dorms, but certainly not as nice as Keohane. My room is…the size of your typical claustrophic single rooms in jarvis, or at Few. But it’s a single, so that’s good. So far the worst thing I’ve encountered here, aside from the not so appetizing English food, is the utterly inexplicable shower system. So basically it’s a little nob that you have to press every minute to keep the water flowing, I’m not exagerrating. Either I’m really stupid and haven’t figured out a better way to work this thing, or whoever designed this piece of shit should have been hit over the head. 

In any case, I’m half unpacked because I’m in desperate need of hangers. So shopping tomorrow morning, and then I’m heading to LSE in the afternoon for our exciting induction. Not really. The important part is I’ll finally see the school. The rest of my week consists of more meetings, inductions, parties, basically a repeat of freshman orientation. Woohoo.

Oh, I also met some craaaazy people here. Just imagine…a dorm with a larger percentage of asians than Duke. Scary, I know.

by Halley

Leaving, again.

So once again, I gotta pack up and hop on another plane for a couple of hours. Leaving home once again (though that concept has become increasingly blurred lately) and back to exploring the new. People always seem disappointed when they don’t hear as much enthusiasm in my voice when I talk about leaving as I should have, but I can’t help always feeling a tinge of sadness and apprehension. More often than not, I actually get a lot more excited once I’m there and settled in. I just suck at saying goodbyes, even though I’ve done it so many times.

By this Sunday morning (greenwich time), I’ll be back at the Heathrow airport and hopefully finding my way to my dorm without getting too lost. Tomorrow will be spent packing, going to the bank, buying a new suitcase, and studying the london tube map and such. Or maybe I’ll just put all that stuff in my carry-on bag and look over them on the plane. That’s prob. a good idea, since I won’t have much else to do for…8 hours. Good god, I hope there will be some good movies. At least I’m not flying to China. There are still a few matters of logistics waiting to be sorted out, but LSE people are being annoying and unresponsive. I guess at the worst, I’ll be bothering them in person next week. 

On a side note, the dollar needs to stop tanking, because when you need to tens of thousands of pounds in tuition and room&board, it gets personal.

by Halley

Yay for daily quotes

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious ambiguity”. Gilda Radner, 1946-1989

Delicious…maybe it’s an acquired taste, but I’d like to have it nevertheless.

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.
– George Bernard Shaw

Word. Sounds a bit like my life right now.

by Halley

Anticipation

Never thought I’d say this, but I wish were in school right now, Duke or LSE. Not that I don’t enjoy staying home and relaxing, but seriously, five months of summer? That’s just a bit too long. Compared to this, I think I will actually welcome the two months next summer. Summers are meant to be spent exploring new places, hanging out with old friends, and engaging in fun and exciting things. But I have done all these in the first three months of summer and I’m ready to move on and return to the world of academia. As shocking as it might sound, I miss the intellectual challenges and, dare I say, the pressure? There is something called “too relaxing” afterall. Maybe it’s just me, but I need deadlines, I need assignments. LSAT practices don’t count. I need something more immediate than a standardized test that won’t come for another year (perhaps a good thing?). 

Meanwhile, I hang on to every email coming from LSE, every little piece of news indicating what is waiting for me across the Atlantic. I have just looked through the finalized editions of the course choices and thoroughly stalked each professor. I’m excited 🙂 They all seem very intelligent, of course. There are the usual impressive CV’s loaded with names like Harvard and UPenn, and there’s also a Chinese professor from Sichuan. Looking through my economic courses and these professors’ (or rather, lecturers) research papers, I’m reminded once again of why I was interested in the field in the first place. Not that I don’t appreciate what I have learned (and partially forgotten) in 55 – 110, but the fundamentals were never meant to be exciting. No one would argue their importance, but the whole point of going through all the torture is so that one day I can apply them to far more interesting problems and discovering new concepts. The goal is to find something that I will have enough interests in to write a senior thesis on. We’ll see how that goes.

On another note, I have fallen in love with Gone With The Wind all over again. I still remember watching the movie for the very first time almost ten years ago and how dazzled I was by the sheer beauty of it. But after a decade, I have suddenly discovered how much the story mirrors my life, and how the characters compare to people I know. Of course, there’s no war, no poverty, and no death, and hopefully…not the realizations that come all too late.

by Halley

Randy Pausch

If you read either NYT or WSJ, you’ve probably have heard of the story of Randy Pausch at least once. If you haven’t, he was a computer science professor from Carneige Mellon who recently died of pancreatic cancer. Last Septmeber, he gave a Last Lecture at the University, saying goodbye to his “work family” and talking about life lessons to an auditorium filled to the limit with 400 people. Ever since this video became available on the web, and WSJ published an article of him, Randy has become a celebrity, with the nick name of St. Randy (a title he vehemently denies).

Why am I bringing this up, instead of just posting a link or two? From the beginning, this reminded of one of my favorite books, Tuesdays With Morie, also about a dying professor and his last words on life, love, and dying, etc. But the story about Randy is is somewhat different, however. For one, he was young, not even 40. He had a wife, whom he was married to for only 8 years, and three young children who will have very blurred memories of him, if at all (his daughter is only 2). While it is equally tragic, Randy’s last days were in many ways more difficult. Dying at a young age usually had such consequences.

A book has been published, co-written by Randy and Jeff Zaslow, a WSJ who wrote that first article on his story. I’ll be reading this in the next month or two, at the latest. I’m also looking forward to watching the famous video of his Last Lecture. (I’ll make sure to have plenty of tissues next to me.) But aside from all the poignancy, insights, and my penchant for advices from dying professors, one last thing struck me: I have used his famous programming software, Alice. A ingenius product created by him to teach high school and college students how to program. I was introduced to this during my AP Computer Science class in my senior year of high school and we all thought it was pretty brilliant, but I never thought he’d die of pancreatic cancer only two years later, or that his story would inspire millions of people, or that he would become St. Randy.