Category: Personal

  • A Difficult Year

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    sundialgirl
    in

    (+) I’d like to think every generation has their own struggles, their own history-defining moment where, collectively, a particular memory is generated and imprinted upon those who survived through that event, only to be forgotten, then misremembered, and then forgotten again. I always though 9/11 was that defining moment for my generation. It turns out…

  • Lockdown, Week 2

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    sundialgirl
    in

    Hours Bleed Into Days I wake up at noon, or just after one o’clock in the afternoon. Husband has already made lunch (usually leftovers from the previous night’s dinner). We do chores – washing the dishes, cleaning the floor, doing the laundry. We don’t have a washing machine, so we decided to just cycle five…

  • Lockdown, Week 1

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    sundialgirl
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    We went to the office. I had a meeting. We heard about a possibility that there were cases on the rise, chatter on social media. Might be a quarantine. We decided to stock up on some basic grocery items at the nearby mall. The queues were already long, but it was okay. We didn’t want…

  • 2009 vs. 2019

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    sundialgirl
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    I didn’t plan these photos, but it seems apt to pull a 2009 photo from when I was living in Singapore, and a 2019 photo from when I visited Singapore earlier this year for a conference. I was 25 years old when the first photo was taken, and obviously after ten years, I think I…

  • The Road to Ph.D: Starting from Scratch

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    sundialgirl
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    To be quite honest, if I didn’t need it for work, I probably wouldn’t be doing this in the first place. But well, here I am, finally pulling the trigger (so to speak) and taking the first concrete steps in applying for a doctorate degree. Sounds so pretentious, right? But I also recognize that, given…

  • Semester in Review: Sem 2, AY 2018-2019

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    sundialgirl
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    Oh boy. This semester kicked my ass so hard. I knew, historically, that the second semester is usually much harder than the first, simply because there was less time to rest between the first and second semesters. On top of that, I also knew that I would have to prepare for a number of things:…

  • On the Cusp of a New Year

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    sundialgirl
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    It’s disheartening to see that my last post here was last July and then for the remainder of the year, I simply let the blog slumber. I have about five or so incomplete drafts of things that I wanted to write about this year, but somehow I can’t seem to pull them out or even…

  • On Imposter Syndrome

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    sundialgirl
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    (Image from https://themighty.com/2017/05/what-panic-attacks-feel-like/) When I was a young (warthog) writer – roughly around high school age, when I first started taking this writing thing seriously – my teacher/mentor figure told me that writers don’t really call themselves “writers”; other people bestow that title on them, like a queen bestowing titles on their subjects. To claim that…

  • Life + Writing Updates, March 2018

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    sundialgirl
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    OH BOY. It seems that I haven’t updated this space in months. That’s insane. We’re in the middle of the semester, which means that the insanity is coming in April (staying true to its “cruelest month” nickname; thanks TS Eliot) what with final requirements for students, thesis defense panels, and final submissions for everything. The term…