Life Update.

I know this is like, a week late but, my parents are gone.

I miss them.

Mum gave me an especially long hug at the airport when I drove them there, I couldn't walk in with them because I was in drop off (so I didn't have to pay for the short stay car park). I'm not really one to be close to my Mum with hugs and all that so it felt weird. I guess you could call me weird for feeling weird hugging my Mum but yeah, my parents aren't really the affectionate type, well, Mum isn't anyway. My Dad would shower me with kisses if he could but it's damn embarrassing at my age. We got to Skype for the first couple of days they were there, I love how my parents do really miss us but they don't show it. It's a cultural thing, Chinese people aren't really the emotional type of people. Deep down I know they miss us though. A few days later in the weekend when my brother was home, we Skyped and they looked so happy to see us, my Dad looked fatter which obviously I pointed out, he looked really happy though. They both did. I'm glad they're both enjoying their time out there, there's no one more deserving to have time to relax than my wonderful parents. If I had the money to, I would send them everywhere around the world because that's how much they deserve it.

So in other news, I got rejected from City University. I was a tiny bit gutted but I wasn't depressed about it (even when they felt the need to send me TWO rejection emails, one at 10am and one at 5pm, like what the hell? One not enough?) It just means that my plans will change a little now, plan B was to do an MRes at UCL in Speech, Language and Cognition as you might have heard me go on about before. I went to their website and had a look at the procedure and I need to submit a research proposal by the deadline (August) so I think I'll spend the summer going over what I want to research into. There's actually multiple areas of speech that interest me, on the developmental side, I'm really interested in evidence based therapy - this is also a reason why I would want to reconsider becoming a speech and language therapist - there's so much research around the effectiveness of therapy and interventions and you know, a lot of the time, they don't even work. I don't know if I could get into a career administering therapy that doesn't work or doesn't have scientific evidence to support its effectiveness - it just all seems like a giant con doesn't it? It's all very controversial. It's the same as saying medicine works but does it really work? Are your painkillers actually doing something to your body or is it just psychological effects? Blah.

I'm also getting interested in the neuroscience behind speech and language from my module this term. If you know me, I hate anything neuro/biologically based because I'm a big fail at biology and in neuroscience there are just too many components to study. Though for language, it's interesting to see which parts of the brain are responsible for certain functions related to language. But yeah, I'll have to teach myself a lot about the brain before I could come up with a research proposal for this. But at the moment a research proposal regarding evidence based therapy seems really nice and interesting to do.

So yup, at the moment, my plan is to finish all pieces of coursework, get my arse sat down for revision over Easter and get my dissertation written up within a month. Graduate, go to HK to see my relatives, spend my summer free as a bird and then come up with a research proposal before August.

Life isn't so bad after all.