tien beat

A couple of weeks into the semester, here's what's going on. We officially have a new president.  I will be following his actions closely, with optimism.  Classes are really great, I have a monkey class, a class taught by the current state treasurer of California, a class about what happens when we do things, and a class where we're currently learning about what people think about the meaning of words.  In other words, I have an anthropology class, a political science class, and two philosophy classes.   I went to the beach today and swung on the rings.  This will be a regular occurrence this semester:  taking advantage of the proximity of beaches.  Why not do homework on the sand? I'm at my dad's house right now...I haven't seen him in about 6 months, and it's the Vietnamese new year!  Hooray!

Hello all! I’m back at school…I haven’t been here in a while. Time to plug back into my alter-ego, the west-coast version of Tien. I’m not sure how that is different from the other me’s, but I definitely feel like I’m operating differently already. I had a wonderful holiday season in Maryland…it’s always so hard to leave. Semester at Sea seems like a lapsed dream. It was a saga so far removed from the familiarity of my usual routines. Even when I look at the pictures, I don’t remember what it felt like to be constantly in transit. I don’t know if it ever really sank in. I’ve been asked by several people what I learned on my voyage. I don’t think I can provide a satisfactory answer to this question. I couldn’t possibly distill my experience into any single realization, or even a handful of them. Every person I met along the way changed my perspective on the world, perhaps not fundamentally, but in a profound personal way. My most optimistic beliefs about humanity were continua