Type A Kathy rants

今天我差不多發脾氣.

差不多發脾氣事件#1: For one of my courses, we have to do a group literature review. That is, we have write a mass essay (2000 words/person) in groups of five. All the other girls in my group are local students and today we got together to discuss our strategy in tackling this mass project. The problem is, we all have so many different views of how this should be done that we spent a lot of time just arguing how the work should be divided. On top of that their language of preference is Mandarin and mine, obviously, is English. When we "debate" our methods, we have to switch between two languages which basically means that we don't get 100% of what the other person just said. As a result, they would discuss amongst themselves in Mandarin and find someone to translate to me in English and I really didn't like that because 1. I feel that I'm not participating fully, 2. they significantly condense the English translation in order to save time, 3. it's frustrating to be able to only comprehend a few phrases in a long sentence and 4. when I explain my ideas to them in English, I feel that they don't understand what I'm trying to say. 弄到我整個人都覺得很煩躁 and completely not in the mood to be a team player.

差不多發脾氣事件#2: I WANT TO GO TRAVELING. 很難得下禮拜不用上課, 本來打算去外走走. As mentioned previously, one of the key reasons for coming to China is to go traveling and see the places that I've always hear of or read about but never been to. I see next week as the PERFECT opportunity to go traveling because 1. no classes at all, 2. I still have money, 3. I have nothing to do, 4. I didn't come all the way to China to hang out in Ningbo and 5. the weather is gorgeous. I thought about staying in Shanghai for one more day after Cheer's concert on Saturday night but the friend that I'm going with has to come back to Ningbo on Sunday. I thought about going to somewhere a bit further away like Suzhou since I have 3 more days off after coming back for Shanghai (better yet, I can just leave from Shanghai). But my other friend who said she'd go vacationing with me says shes too busy to afford a 3-4 day vacation and wants to restrict the trip to a 1 day thing to Shaoxing. It took a lot of persuasion on my part before she even agreed to consider a 2-day-1-night thing to Shaoxing. But honestly, I think it's a waste of perfectly fine time to go traveling to some further places since Shaoxing can easily be done on a weekend. She keeps telling me that I will have plenty of opportunities in April/May to go to other places for weekends but I just feel that we'll keep getting more and more busy. Another thing that's bugging me is that I know she's super busy and probably doesn't really want to go to these places with me because she's probably been to all of them and honestly I don't want to force her to go anywhere if she doesn't want to go. But if she doesn't go, it means that I might have to consider going alone but I can't imagine how that will be like. Or if my mom would ever let me do that.

Argh. Why can't everything be simple, straightforward, bam-bam-bam, figure-it-out-now?
Relax Kathy, at least you have Cheer's concert to look forward to.

Currently listening: 靈感 - 陳綺貞