We'll get to the point someday where I don't need to tell you about the time I got on a bus with two suitcases and no place to live and ended up in Manhattan on a Tuesday afternoon--I promise. Here's the one thing you should know about me: I'm terrible at being spontaneous.

I'm terrible at doing anything without a plan, really, which is ridiculous considering I gave my commencement speech on how it's ok to not have a plan every time you think you need one. And I believe it--but isn't it the case that our own advice is always the hardest to take?

But I think I've always been like this. During my kindergarten science fair, I was part of a demonstration/skit where a bunch of us wore brown paper bags with holes and held hands to represent the asteroid belt. We spent the week practicing our cues--when to step onto the asphalt stage of the playground, where to walk, when to exit--but on the day of the fair, a teacher asked me if I wanted to be a comet instead.

So I got dressed in a white sash and hat and prepared to stand with the rest of the comets as the show began. And then I looked around at the rest of the comets and suddenly realized I didn't know what I was doing. The teachers told me to just follow what the others were doing, and it wouldn't be difficult at all, but I panicked. I didn't know how to be a comet!

I ran to my teacher and started to cry. "I can't be a comet!" I said while she tried to calm me down. "I'm not a comet!"

I mentioned before that I started filling a jar with positive thoughts last year in hopes I would stuff it so full with paper that it would explode with joy when I opened it to read in 2014.

Of course, as I also mentioned, I was terrible last year at finishing personal projects. I'm one of those people who buy journals and diaries and puts it down in ink that I'll write "every day," only to abandon it three pages later. It's horrible, and something I know I need to change.

But in the meantime, it is 2014 and time to open this jar to see what happiness the first half of the year brought, despite that feeling of discontent that permeated much of January through May.

In the dozens and dozens of notes, the most common theme seems to be gratitude--for people, for places, for the moments in life that remind me why I'm here.

01.04.13: Listened to these guys with accents on the train earlier planning their NY sightseeing weekend and it struck me: I live here.

I'm not quite sure what to make of 2013. In many ways, it was wonderful; in some ways, it was the complete opposite. It was a year of gains and losses, of rising progress and crashing hopes.

I've never been one for lengthy lists of resolutions, but if I resolve to do at least one thing in the new year, it's this:

I could bore you with a lede about how social media has made it easier to be mean to one another on the internet, but instead I'll jump straight to the point, because the point is there's no way to lead into this tweet I received on Friday:

It's been two years, but there's something that still bothers me: one night in 2011, before a midnight showing of this horrible movie I was dragged into seeing, the conversation somehow turned to ethnicity and how much I had in common with another girl in our group of moviegoers--a  girl of Vietnamese descent.

"Well, you're both pretty whitewashed," the guy I arrived with, who knew us both, said.

I sat up a little straighter and prepared to bite back, refusing to accept this label from someone who, while I was close to at the time, seemed wholly unaware how offensive that statement was. But before I could say anything, the other girl laughed and said, "Yeah, I totally am!"

What even makes a person "whitewashed"? Is it the food he or she chooses? The music, the films, the clothes that he or she prefers? Or the language he or she speaks most often at home?

Does it make that person more American? What does that--"being American"--even mean anyways? And what does that mean for me, the daughter of an immigrant family who was born and raised in California?

"I have always viewed Miss America as the girl next door, and the girl next door is evolving as the diversity in America evolves." That was Miss New York Nina Davuluri's answer to a question she received on Sunday night at the annual Miss America pageant about Julie Chen's plastic surgery to make her look less Asian. Davuluri, whose pageant platform was "celebrating diversity through cultural competency," walked away with the crown at the end of the night--becoming the first Indian-American woman to be named Miss America, and the second Asian American in pageant history to win.

First, a disclaimer: the majority of my knowledge surrounding pageants comes from Miss Congeniality. "It's not a beauty pageant, it's a scholarship competition!" And, to be fair, Miss America is in large part a scholarship competition: in fact, it's the single largest scholarship competition in this country, according to this discussion on Sunday's Melissa Harris-Perry before the competition aired. (I highly recommend watching that video segment and the segment that followed it, as it dives into the deeper discussion of the relevancy of the Miss America pageant--a topic that is very interesting and complex, but one I won't be focusing on here in this post.)

Second: if you thought Davuluri's achievement wouldn't go without racist remarks from the internet peanut gallery, you were right. "Miss New York is an Indian.. With all do respect this is America," one person tweeted. Others called her an Arab and a terrorist, and said her win was offensive so close to the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

Posts that featured these negative remarks were shared thousands of times within hours of the pageant's conclusion. And while the sharing of these negative remarks was criticized itself, I think it's important that we recognize the racism that still runs through our society in this day and age, and understand that it goes beyond those who use a social network and choose to express their discriminatory thoughts in such a casual manner. Alyssa Rosenberg over at ThinkProgress put it best: "What’s interesting about the reaction to Davuluri’s crowning isn’t that teenagers say stupid things, but that people are uncomfortable with a woman of color being held up as an ideal of All-American beauty and femininity."