Back in Malaysia, people think stay-at-home moms are a bunch of “tai-tais” who play mahjong all day at home while their Indonesian/Cambodian maids take care of the kids.

Here in the US, the popularly held stereotype is a minivan-driving, jogger-pushing, mommy-blogging, baby-carrots-popping, organic-buying, sweater-knitting, control freak who openly professes to love her job but secretly wishes that working moms all over the world will get their come uppance (sooner rather than later) so we can all look up smugly at our ceilings at night and say to ourselves, “All this misery is justified. I made the right choice!”

Anyway, my point is I’ve done both (well, I never played mahjong in the afternoons but I did have a maid, my mom, my in-laws AND husband to help out while I, ahem, worked), and I swear, time has never run away from me the way it’s done so the month of March (the snow threw me off). We’re now approaching Spring break and I don’t even know if I should box up all those sweaters and jackets seeing that Mr Weatherman (Rae thinks he’s the one who’s confused) is a little flaky these days.

My second quarter of classes has sprung as well. I’m taking Intermediate Algebra, Research Paper Writing and Advanced Beginner’s Chinese this quarter and it looks like I’m NOT breezing through this one. The teachers are somehow a little less…cooperative. For example, my math prof (who has to be the slowest talker in the world) seems to have a penchant for regaling us with personal stories and drawing analogies that he thinks parallels an algebraic expression but really do not make any sense.

Math, he says, is about phenomena. It’s like a moving target (his words). “You just have to follow it Through. The. Phenomena,” Mr M says, emphasizing with the last three words with his whiteboard marker. My brain, which had been suspended happily in the air waiting for the ready arms of Advanced Algebra Wisdom to send me soaring towards Higher Math, meets rudely instead with a solid wall of confusion. The result is a splitting headache.

Ah well. It still beats waking up to the smell of vomit on your child’s hair.

ps. Can someone show me how the hell a graphing calculator works?

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