I wish every trip to the dentist ended like this...

Packing Tips

Not only did I overpack, I overpacked for a 5 day trip to Tampa, FL in 30 minutes. Needless to say, everything was thrown haphazardly into my suitcase and I had to sit on it to zip it up. Not having learned my lesson the first time around, I repeated the same process on the trip back.

Each way of the trip, I opened my suitcase to find a note that my bag was "randomly" searched. Underneath the note, the airline had neatly organized and repacked my luggage.

Lesson learned: a messy packer saves time - and apparently you'll get your luggage repacked for free. 

Happy Lunar New Year!!

I've been wanting to update more, but this semester is just really crazy. 2009 started off really rocky, but the only thing I have to say is God's grace is abundant!!

So much is happening, even just over the past week or so. I'm learning lessons and really living life. I even changed the name of the blog from "reflections" to "living in grace."

Can't write more right now since I'm a little behind on reading for my Neuroscience class (I know, yikes!) but wanted to leave you with one picture.

Since today is another chance at having new beginnings (Chinese New Year), I decided to start off my new year detoxifying mind, body, and soul. Well, part of the body detox is to stock up on nutrition this week and weed out sweets. I'm eating oatmeal and fruit for breakfast, a hearty split green pea stew for lunch, and steamed veggies and brown rice for dinner. As snacks I stocked my fridge with carrots and celery with hummus.

Well, the split green pea stew was interesting to make. At first, it looked delicious as I had added red potatoes, carrots, and other vegetables. However, the last step of the recipe was to blend soft tofu and spinach into a creamy concoction and stir it into the stew. To my dismay, it turned the stew almost a flourescent green color:

Luckily for me, it tastes sooo much better than it looks. Happy Lunar New Year!!!

Happy New Year!!

Final reflections of 2008

The clock reads 12:51AM and I cannot sleep. My alarm is set for 5AM. No doubt a nap will be in order tomorrow afternoon before the New Year's Eve festivities begin.

I've been wanting to post this for awhile, but for some reason have been putting it off. For the greater part of my life, I've had really bad posture due to a weak core. The style of yoga I had gotten into is Ashtanga, which has a reputation for being very hard on the rotator cuffs due to the number of vinyasas in each practice. As I began to build strength, my front chest and shoulder muscles bulked up while my back muscles were sadly neglected, exascerbating my ape-woman posture. This was pointed out to me by a watchful instructor, and I began to really work on heart-openers and backbends. Enter the introduction of second series of Ashtanga, and I was really able to open up. My posture improved, and all was right with my yoga practice again. However, as my second series practice got longer, I've been feeling fatigued in my front shoulder muscles, and I noticed my shoulders drooping forward ever so slightly when I'm resting in bed. I was baffled.

Well, last week I got my answer. Matthew D., the Michigan (more accurately, Midwest) Ashtanga guru I've been practicing under is an absolutely fantastic instructor. After watching me practice a measly 2 times, he made an observation that no one has ever caught before. Though my shoulders were very open and my posture good in the held postures, my shoulders were still hunching - badly, I might add - in transitionary postures (tittibasana and bakasana - for those who are curious). Today, when I was practicing, I got into those transition postures again. Suddendly, I hear him shout across the room to me, "lift those shoulders and straighten that spine!!" I couldn't. I completely lacked the muscles to do so. It was sobering to realize that all this time I thought I was building upper back muscles, I've been fooling myself by overcompensating with being super open in the chest. Matthew later pointed out to me, the drooping shoulders that came back to haunt me was likely produced by fatigue when I increased the number of postures I practiced due to second series.

Underlying problems show themselves during mindless transitions. In the case of yoga, you could not detect my hunched shoulder problem in the "regular postures" - they only appeared during mindless transitions. Likewise in my life, my character flaws and reactions that show up in transitory periods are not aberrant behavior - rather, they are symptoms of hidden underlying issues. I truly believed that I had matured and worked through some character flaws that I had. However, those flaws still show up from time to time: when I am under a lot of stress from school, when I lack sleep, when I am on vacation stuck in a hotel room with my entire family. I wrote those behaviors off thinking they were brought up by these special circumstances. No. These unregulated behaviors are actually indicative of my true state.

So what now? I have yet to make a list of New Year's Resolutions yet (surprising, since it's pretty much my favorite thing to do every year). But one thing for sure I will do change from here on out: I will pay attention to my behaviors during transitory periods rather than excusing them away.

Christmas Break

I woke up this morning at 4:45AM to drive to Royal Oak to practice Ashtanga with a local authorized instructor. At around 5:40, I slid on some black ice, skidded across 3 lanes on the freeway, and got stuck in a snowbank that blocked me from a steep hill. As I waited for the arrival of the tow truck and a very concerned dad, I contemplated just how lucky I was to survive without a scratch! Since I was in the left lane, I could have veered left and smashed into a wall. There could have been cars to my right, yet I coasted all the way to right shoulder without encountering another vehicle. Had the snow bank not been there, I would definitely have rolled down the hill, and had I been going too fast, I would have flipped over the snow bank.

Yet I'm alive. Thank GOD!! I remained pretty calm for much of the ordeal and arrived at the shala almost 2 hours later than I intended. I entered in a state of frenzy, berating myself for a wasted morning and distraught that now I would have a much shorter yoga practice than I would have otherwise.

My instructor gently calmed me down. He told me to stop focusing what I had lost this morning. I couldn't control what happened to me. Rather than viewing my time as lost and wasted, I needed to think of the time before me as a gift. Plans are plans, but you cannot lose what you did not have. You can only embrace what you have in front of you.

I came back from this semester incredibly jaded. I felt unhappy with where I was in my program, with where my life is and where it looked like it was going. What if I had chosen a different field? What if I made some different decisions in my life? What really frustrated me was that yes, I could just pick up and leave and "follow my dreams," but for some unknown reason, I know that I am (albeit unhappily) in the right place. I came back to Michigan for 3 weeks with a single prayer: that God would give me perspective and a renewed outlook on life.

For most of today, I've been chewing on this verse: "I will remove from you all who mourn over the loss of your appointed festivals, which is a burden and reproach for you." Zephaniah 3:18. It struck me that perhaps part of the reason I feel so jaded is that I had these plans of how my life was going to turn out. I have an ideal in my head of what success is, or at least what "success" looks like for Tracy. What it means for Tracy to be following God's call on her life. Now that I don't see how my life is leading that way, I mourn that loss and am completed fixated on the what-ifs.

Plans are plans; they were never anything I had a tangible claim to. I cannot lose what I never had; I can only embrace what I have in front of me. Why do those people in Zephaniah receive God's reproach? Because they are so focused on those festivals, rituals, and plans that they forgot to simply embrace God. So rather than focusing on what could have been, I need to seek God in what is now. I need to lay down the sense of entitlement to the life that I believe that I should have and begin embracing the life that I have. And rather than idolizing what I believe it means to serve God, I just need to cut all that idealistic crap and look for God here and now.

Hopefully, these lessons will slowly transfer from my head to my heart. Excitingly, this is all from day 1 of my Michigan trip!

Ashtanga is not for the faint of heart...

Lamentations 3:22-24

Because of the LORD's great love we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
I say to myself, "The LORD is my portion;
therefore I will wait for him.

Real Update Soon....

Next few weeks are a bit chaotic - can't wait for my life to normalize!!! For now, here's another video that makes me smile:

Details in the Fabric

Dance!

Tracy versus Midas

I don't think of myself as a person with a chip on her shoulder. I don't go through life feeling like the world doesn't treat me right because of my identity as a woman or as an Asian woman. I am a bit paranoid, however, whenever I take my car in to get fixed.

My car has been racking up some problems: the rear left blinker hasn't worked since July, I needed to get my oil changed, and I have a feeling the O2 sensor is not working as efficiently as it should. I took my car into Midas this weekend and hoped for the best. After an hour, I was sitting in Subway next door when I get a call from the mechanic. "I have some news for you," he says, then proceeds to list a bunch of services my car needs with the final price of about $200.

Crap. My first thought was that they probably saw me and thought one word: woman. Knowing that my car-knowledgeable friend Gehr was only a phone call away, I replied without skipping a beat "okay, I need you to list again what exactly needs to be serviced and how much it is costing me." I interrupted him often, asking him to distinguish between labor costs and material costs. Having clearly taken him by surprise, his tone of voiced changed completely. I told him I wanted to go to the shop in person before signing off on any services. "Yes ma'am," he answered. "We'll be waiting for you."

A phone call later, turns out I didn't need half the services that were suggested. I go in, tell them firmly what I wanted done and what I didn't need done. I ask him how much longer before my car is ready. "Well, we need to get a new air filter for you...that may take about an hour." I looked him evenly in the eye, "Do I really need a new filter?"

"Well ma'am, I guess it wasn't that dirty."

"Could it last another 3000 miles?"

"I suppose it can... yes, you'll be fine until your next oil change."

Bam, another $16 bucks saved. Final amount spent: $50. Tracy wins this round, Midas!

Isaiah 45:4-7

For the sake of Jacob my servant,
of Israel my chosen,
I summon you by name
and bestow on you a title of honor,
though you do not acknowledge me.

I am the LORD and there is no other;
apart from me there is no God.
I will strengthen you,
though you have not acknowledged me,
so that from the rising of the sun
to the place of its setting
people may know there is none besides me.

I am the LORD, and there is no other.
I form the light and create darkness,
I bring prosperity and create disaster;
I, the LORD, do all these things.

Interesting account of Calvinism

"Calvin wrote his epochal work, the Institutes of the Christian Religion, when he was only twenty-six, and never changed his mind on any salient point; in it, he rigorously drew together all the most severe elements of the Old Testament, the patristic writings, and Lutheranism, and derived from them by selection and extension a ferocious theology built upon total human depravity, the implacable wrath of God with man, and the concepts of absolute predestination, the election of the every few, and the certain damnation of all the rest.

Had Calvin been a happier or healtheir man, Puritanism might never have been puritanical, and the thinking of the Genevans, the Dutch, the Scotch, the English, and the Americans ever since might have been different... Unlike Luther, Calvin did not enjoy playing the lute or flute, eating broiled fish, or downing a flagon of beer; unlike Luther, he was small and thin, dyspeptic and ailing, intense and unhumorous. Conceivably, the ascetic and repressive features that mark Puritanism at its unloveliest and have given it a bad name owe as much to one man's glandular shortcomings as to the social goals of the bourgeoisie."

~ from Morton Hunt's "The Natural History of Love."

Reactions?

SNL and Politics

These two videos had me laughing to the point of tears. Enjoy!

$2.99???

Holy smokes! Rode past a gas station this morning on my way to school that was selling gas for $2.99 a gallon...

Just for laughs

Could not stop cracking up this morning:



Ah, the ridiculousness sometimes.

A picture is worth a thousand words...

Why have I not been sleeping well the last couple of weeks? Here's why:

For Sale

Anyone in need of a dining room table? We're replacing the glass table with one I bought at Ikea to match our chairs. There's a few scratches on the glass, but otherwise in good condition. $45 or best offer - the chairs are NOT for sale. Let me know!!

Life's a Blur

It's a beautiful day out today. Woke up this morning feeling incredibly lazy. I cleaned the apartment from top to bottom, did my laundry, booked my flight home for Christmas break, and am now studying for my stats exam before writing a paper for my Old Testament Sunday school class and reading for research.

Life's a blur. But once in awhile I'll get a moment to sit and enjoy the fresh air and watch my roommate's dog play on our deck.