Today is the anniversary of my grandmother's birthday. She would have been around eighty-five years old. I actually had a dream about her last night (not remembering that it was her birthday); kind of like a refurbished memory of when I stayed with her in her apartment.

After you are rescued from this sinful earth in the Rapture, who will feed the cat?

I find myself caught in one of those "circles of life" — not like the big happy ones seen in The Lion King but rather the type that you keep living through, over and over and over again. You can't jump out. You just keep trying things in hopes that the circle would, at least, widen or in hopes that you will be pulled out.

I am talking about students from Asia — mainly India and China. As someone who came to the United States as a graduate student from a very poor Asian country, I can tell you that there is something compelling and very attractive about American universities.

Being a Valentine's Day non-enthusiast by rule, I surprised myself today by wearing a pink dress and entering a shopping mall to watch the movie Valentine's Day with my friends (all Valentine's Day groupies). The movie — which I likened to Love Actually and was keen to see — turned to out to be a confirmation that Valentine's Day is indeed a shallow, commercialized, and manipulative celebration of everything but love (a viewpoint that, until now, I have been reluctant to agree with).