The most effective and healthy way to lose weight...

... is to go on a D-lab trip. Especially trips to locations whose food you don't like.

It's not that I don't like Indian food, but my appetite decreases fast when the same kind of food is served everyday. In Avani, the same kind of food is served everyday, and it's vegetarian, and there isn't much if any variety. Many members of the Avani community are vegetarians and all pay for their daily meals here, therefore really simple and low-cost dishes are used to make it more affordable. What makes me feel less guilty about sometimes not wanting this tasty food is that my body seems to be accepting it as part of the daily routines and turning indifferent instead of favoring or objecting. In short, my fondness for the food here over time is like the graph of binding energy vs distance, where the y-axis is fondness (0 is neutral) and the x-axis is time.

I have a background of limited luxury in rural Vietnam where life quality is not much different from Avani. Experiencing the same thing as an outsider, however, gave fresh and insightful perspective. It was easy to wonder how the people around here can eat the same dishes every day happily, and then I would remember how a bowl of plain white rice and fish sauce would easily last me for months.

Except for the chai. I have no problem drinking Avani chai everyday. I'll even make it frequently in Cambridge. It just doesn't get old.

First post

I am writing something here because Blogspot is unhappy with me not having any post.

That is how my first post to a blog usually goes; and usually it would have ended after the first sentence. Unusually, I kind of have something to say this time.

I am closing AoNikki, my blog on My Opera, after couple years of very sporadic new posts.  The majority of posts on AoNikki were written during the two years when I transitioned from UWC Costa Rica to MIT, and have been extremely important in the first steps in my journey of self-discovery. Now, however, I feel that they no longer reflect who I am -- which is fine -- and make me feel pressured to only write about things that are consistent with the theme of the whole blog -- which is not. Don't expect to see an update on AoNikki because there will be none; the old posts, however, will stay there because they are quite pleasant to read. Some of them are kind of silly, and that's fine too.