True Dedication

²⁴ And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals, each according to its kind.” And it was so. ²⁵ God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.

So, I buy cage-free eggs (and meat from outside-living animals). I guess some people would find it crazy. Why spend extra 40 cents on 12 eggs? Well, because I would rather not eat an egg produced by some suffering poor bird, who ate c%$p all of her life and never saw the sunlight.

I was particularly happy to find eggs from Amish farms lately at our local farmers market.

To all those who think that people who buy cage-free eggs are crazy, our actions are perfectly rational. My satisfaction from knowing I eat from happy chickens is actually more than those 40 cents so both sides end up better off.

But, to end my aimless talking, here is a story that I wanted to share originally. This man is staying in the radiation-contaminated zone in Japan to take care of some of the thousands abandoned animals after all the people evacuated. The only man living in the forbidden zone. Many of the animals have died of hunger. This awesome man is feeding the ones still alive, the dogs, cats, and others. I have a great respect for him. He is literally giving up his life for these animals (because he will likely die early due to all the radiation). He lives with no electricity, eating only rice and canned food. Oh, and he has an ostrich!

My 40 cents don't compare to his 20 years of life.

Stop Those Credit Card Offers

Lately, I have been getting way too many credit card offers. While this may be sign of my credit score building up, I do not appreciate having to tear up each and every offer into pieces. Time is precious. Maybe I am overreacting, but I would not want someone opening an account in my name... So, I was really happy to find this website of the FTC. It has instructions on how to unsubscribe from the offers of credit cards and insurance using the OptOutPrescreen.com website. You should give it a try! :)

How to cut your hiking supplies' weight in half?

My aunt and I are going on a two week long hiking trip in a couple of days. We will be hiking along the coast of Southwest England, through the wilderness. And we will be carrying everything with us (except for a tent and a sleeping bag).

Since I am not a good hiker at all, I am concerned about the weight on my back quite a lot. Before I would put anything on my packing list, I always weighted several items on my kitchen scale and decided to take only the lightest of things. To my surprise, the weight was still ending up at 12 kg (more then 20 lbs) and that was quite scary. For two months I was thinking of the tiresome travel with these 12 kilograms of 'stuff'.

Tonight, I made a great discovery! I realized that in the 'Grand total' weight, I also included the subtotals... Yes! I am that bad! I don't care though because this has just cut my hiking weight to only little over 6 kilograms. And that is much better than 12 :)

Climbing up a growing mountain

I have never been a fan of rock climbing and whenever anyone starts talking about it, all of my insides usually start twisting inside of me. It's called 'fear of heights' or acrophobia. Here though, I would like to mention one of my class experiences.

It is good that my professors are very smart. Learning from the smart and knowledgeable people, though it doesn't necessarily 'make' the student knowledgeable, does add something to the knowledge of the student. Certainly, it adds more insight to the lecture and makes it more interesting. Sometimes a professor's intelligence may seem counterproductive especially when the knowledge 'gap' between the student and the professor is very large.

In one of my classes, Statistics and Probability, our professor is Essie, an Iranian genius. He is a wonderful man, with a voice worth using for the recording of children's bedtime stories, good sense of humor, and a great attitude towards econometrics and his students. However, it seems that he was not given the ability to 'come down' to his students in terms of the material he is teaching. And so, much of his lectures are filled with 'random' formulas appearing on the dry-erase board. The formulas have no names (or at least no names that could be comprehensibly written down in my notes for future reference). They are long and complex, something you cannot Google... They come from some unknown spot in the textbook.

However, knowing that we are using the textbook and that the professor 'is' referring to is (but I can't really confirm that), I decided to study the textbook beginning with chapter one onwards. The pace of my studying is very slow - 2 or 3 subchapters per day (including assigned exercises) while Essie is moving at a pace of about 8 subchapters per lecture. And so, this whole process of me studying feels like I am climbing an ever-growing mountain, which is growing at a faster pace than I am able to climb at. I am sure I could even come up with an equation for this :).

For now, I will just keep climbing and hope that one day I will be so intelligent and will be able to catch up with the mountain. I have to by the time our core exams come anyways...

What's New

As I was writing an e-mail to my friend Barb, I realized that perhaps I should share the information here too. Maybe that is what I should have done in the first place. Here is an update on my life:

Atlanta downtown from the Turner Field

The first couple weeks here were very new to me, new people, new professors, new teaching style, new weather, and a new city. Classes here are not like in college, here the professor uses the class time to tell us what we should know and we go home and study that. I was not used to this at all, but now it's ok and so I am fine with having just three classes take up all of my free time. The first exam went better than I thought and I passed my first class (it was only a pass-fail grade). I think we learned about 1 semester of math per day and it was truly a fast pace :D.

Part of our class hiked the Stone Mountain

I also never thought that there were any Christians in our class until I went to the IVCF Graduate Christian Fellowship where I was one of my classmates, Jing, from China. Jing is a very sweet girl and her life journey is very similar to mine. She is also the only child. I have also found out just recently that a 3rd year student in our department (also Jing, but a different one) is also a Christian. However, I went to the concert with the 1st Jing, my classmate. It was a wonderful concert and it was for free (organized by The Fish radio station). Jing, who never had a funnel cake, really wanted one, and I think funnel cakes do go well with outdoors concerts and so we set on this journey of waiting in line for 2 hours to get a delicious funnel cake. So we missed the concerts of Natalie Grant and Big Daddy Weave. We did get to see the concert of Switchfoot which was great and soon e both ended up jumping and doing all kinds of crazy stuff. :D

Jing and I with our Funnel Cakes

Our school year has already started. We have only 3 classes - Macroeconomics, Microeconomics, and Statistics and Probability. Our macro professor has not arrived yet because of some visa issues, so we just have his lecture notes and a very difficult assignment that although is due in two weeks, not even the 5th year students know how to solve - it is a programming problem set.

Also, I have been trying to go to different churches around. The first church was quite unwelcoming, but the other two (all PCA) were good. The church that I went to yesterday is my favorite so far. There are perhaps 3oo people at the service, they worship with both hymns and contemporary music and the pastor is very much awesome. His message was so deep and yet very well understandable and applicable. I think I really liked his teaching. They were also baptizing babies yesterday, which was really cute :). After the service, I joined the 'Young Singles' group for a bible study and talking. It was very good to see some people of my age who were all so friendly and godly :) I think I will definitely go back to this church.

As for exercise, I have joined the girls' ultimate frisbee team and also our department's soccer team. This way, I 'tricked' my body into exercising while having fun :) I also went to see the Braves yesterday, but that is no exercise and the cheesy nachos I ate were so good!

At the Braves' Game

Also, I forgot to mention our hummingbirds. I bought them a feeder so that they would come more often. I even took a picture of one :)

I don't like complaining but...

I arrived at Emory University at the end of July 2010, all pumped up about the new school year. That's when I didn't know all the problems that were to appear. Here is just one of the frustrating things with Emory that I had to deal with:

Driver's License

In Georgia, an international student is eligible to get a driver's license only after the school registers the poor student's SEVIS number in the immigration system. Knowing that my PA DL expires on August 14th, but not knowing the GA rules, I attempted to get my DL at the end of July. I was told that I was not registered in the system yet by my school. So off I went to see my international advisor and ask her to register me. My advisor, Angela, told me that the 'standard practice' is to register all new international students in the system 2 to 3 weeks after the school year starts (1 month after the PA license's expiration date).

WHY? Because some students may withdraw in the 1st few weeks.

OK I get it, but why me? I was already taking a full time class, which started on August 2nd, and I had paid the small $256 bill that was left on my school fees. I was fully registered.

So, the ISSP department decided that upon attending a check-in session (90 minutes of a silly presentation and the filling out of 3 forms - at least one of them with full contact information), a student can e-mail Kate B. in the department who will then register the student.

I attended the session on August 9th and e-mailed Kate B. on August 10th. Because I received no reply to my e-mail, I also e-mailed Angela to see if something went wrong. Again, no reply.

On Friday the 13th of August, I decided to visit the local DMV (a 20-30 minute drive) thinking that my now my SEVIS would of course be registered (it couldn't possibly take 4 days, right?). I waited in line for 45 minutes at the DMV to get a paper with a number on it. Then I waited 90 minutes to see that number appear on a screen. Window 4! I gave the lady at window 4 all the materials, she took my picture and my signature and then... " there is a problem in the system." she told me. Great, no license for me.

On Tuesday, I e-mailed Angela again to see what went wrong. If my SEVIS was registered, or was it!?, I should have had my license by now.

On Wednesday the 18th, I receive the following reply at 8:38 am: 'Send me your local address by noon today and I will register you in the SEVIS system'.

But, here is the problem:

1) At 8:38 am, I was already on my way to a class that goes from 9 am till noon - how am I supposed to respond to the e-mail in time!?

2) Why can't Angela just open one of the numerous forms I had to fill out during the check-in session and FIND my local address on it!?

Should I complain to the head of the department about the way people there work? How is this even possible?

When church makes me cry...

Last night, all pumped up, I started to search for churches to go to this Sunday. I looked at all the PCA churches around and found one of a modest size. It actually seemed like a very great church. The pastor seemed like a great guy, the website looked welcoming, the church supports a lot of missionaries, has a choir and a young adults worship service on Sunday evenings. So, basically everything I ever wished for in a church.

I decided to go to the morning service, since this is what I am used to. I arrived at the church parking lot about 15 minutes before the start of the service. On my way to the building door, I saw this old lady, who apparently was having a hard time walking. First I was looking to see if anyone from the inside would come (someone could see her through the glass door) and open the door for her. No one was coming so I ran forward to open it. She was so happy!

This made me think of why so many churches I know have greeters at the door, but PCA churches don't.

Then I proceded to find the nave of the church. That's when I realized that I probably didn't come in through the main entrance, or at least I thought so. There were exactly no signs to the pews, so I walked through this long hallway with offices and some classrooms. It took me about 5 minutes to find where the service was actually held. The church was a medium size, 300 people could be easily seated there. I took a seat in the back row on the side and began watching the people around me.

There was just something sad about all the people there. No one ever since I entered the building said hello to me, not once. In fact the only people after the old lady who said anything to me were the ones who with 'Excuse me!' were rushing past me into the pew to get to their seats. And this made me cry. Why are people like that? I so wished I could be back in Erie, going to church with friends again.

And so I cried through the first half of the service, wondering whether I should just leave now or wait for the actual sermon. Then I decided to stay and the sermon after all wasn't too bad. The pastor was quite energetic and his thoughts were all over the place, but the message was worth it and completely made me stop crying.

Now I am just wondering whether I should go next week to the same church to the young adults worship or not. Will those people be so unwelcoming as their parents/older church members? Or should I just try a non-PCA church knowing that no church could possibly be less welcoming than this one?