hello again!

It’s so strange to think that two years have passed since I last wrote anything here. I used to make an annual recap post (e.g. exhibits A, B, and C, with a few other posts randomly interspersed in that timeline), but I missed my last one in December 2022/January 2023 due to work and theatre keeping me busy (which, now that I think about it, is also an apt summary of my life at any point in the last 15 months…). So here I am, trying to get back into it!

This doesn’t mean I’ve taken a hiatus from writing, since these two years coincidentally line up with me getting back into regular pen-and-paper journaling. For some reason, I decided in the summer of 2022, “hey, I’d like to be one of those cool fancy adulting adults who writes with fountain pens in beautifully formed cursive,” and I actually pulled it off! It did require a two-month period of learning to be comfortable with my frequently less-than-elegant letters as I picked the skill up, but it sure has been worth it. I’m very proud of the letters and cards I can craft now.

That being said, I’ve maybe become a bit too comfortable writing without a filter in the privacy of my journal, and I also haven’t quite figured out a) if this blog is worth maintaining, or b) how to strike the right balance of preserving anonymity and providing detail, so this post will be an interesting experiment. Some of the people reading this will have known me since I was younger (and will therefore be familiar with the all-lowercase-word-vomit-ramblings I used to unwisely post on various forums, including this blog and its now-deleted predecessor); many others will have met me in the last few years (during which time I have nominally been a functional, professional adult). Thanks for being here either way 🙂

chaos behind, uncertainty ahead

The last time I wrote anything on this blog was almost exactly two years ago. It was right after a semester I at the time thought was the worst I’d ever experienced, right before 2020 came barreling in and uprooted everything we thought we knew. Since then, I feel that I’ve simultaneously morphed into a new person and also made zero progress as a human at all. I’ve spent the two weeks so far of winter break in an immobile rut: sleeping 10–11 hours per night, spending my days wasting away before a screen and binge-watching YouTube and Netflix, occasionally keeping my hands busy with some crafting. It’s been the ultimate rebound from the absolute chaos this past semester’s been, although I can’t keep it up for much longer; for example, there are some important emails to which I’ve procrastinated over a week on responding.

Sabotaging my grand effort to do absolutely nothing, my brain’s been playing solo ping-pong by keeping a set of thoughts constantly bouncing around my head, most of them to which I don’t have enough information to properly answer. (I’ve actually been meaning to journal for weeks, but at this point handwriting my thoughts would take hours, so here I am!) The following conversation between myself and… a more rational version of myself?… illustrates my current state of being.

end of the decade

It is currently 20:15 on December 31st, and I am finally forcing myself to sit down and write something—anything—even remotely reflective before the year comes to an end. As of writing this, I haven’t checked my past posts, so I have no idea how long it’s been since I last put anything out onto the Internet. I bet it’s an embarrassingly long time.

Here’s an itemized, unordered list of my current thoughts, whether on the past year or the past decade. It’ll be a combination of reflections and resolutions and everything in between.

thoughts from china

Hi! It’s me again. I love how in January I said I would write more, because that clearly just hasn’t happened. Couple of things first:

1. I find it interesting that China doesn’t actually block WordPress, considering the idea that a blogging platform would be conductive to freeform thought-spewing content the Chinese government would want to shield… but I’m glad it’s not. I’m fairly low on hotel pastimes other than studying in advance for my classes (oops), so here I am.
2. Conspicuously, other than the title of this post, I’m no longer writing in full lowercase. For some reason, a switch flipped in me this past year, and I no longer find that lowercase allows me to write more organically or directly or any adverbial rationale I used to have for that choice. Maybe it’s because I’ve had to professionally present myself in emails more often, or that I spent my freshman year working a part-time job that bridged both professional writing and mathematics. Either way, it’s honestly kind of bittersweet, because it means I’m past the point in my life where lowercase flow-of-consciousness ranting on Google+ is a reasonable outlet. (Is this maturity? I honestly have no clue.)

Anyways, let’s jump out of the list before I write the entire post in multilevel list form.

assorted thoughts on being nineteen

it is actually one day after my birthday, but i viscerally don’t want to finish typesetting my homework due tomorrow afternoon… or finish a (supposedly quick) programming assignment… or go back to my dorm and sleep. so here i am. i have no real organizational scheme in mind for this post and i’m far too tired to come up with one, so here is a list of various thoughts that have come to mind over the past 48 hours.

resolutions: 2019 edition

i find it mildly hilarious that this is the first time i’ve written two posts in a single month. hopefully i manage to continue writing multiple posts per moon in 2019! (cue nervous laughter.)

it is currently 21:44 on december 31st. i was actually debating between figuring out what to play to start off the year right and writing this, but i figure i can do the former afterwards.

anyways, i feel like actually writing things out forces a commitment on my part. it’s why i keep a physical notebook for course assignments instead of just depending on canvas and aggressively maintain a google calendar for every last commitment in my schedule. sometimes i just put on there things i should do in the hopes that i actually commit to them at a predetermined time, e.g. an event titled “do your laundry, it’s been six days” set from 12am to 2am.

thoughts on 2018

(a.k.a. my biannual post in which i spew out insufficiently organized thoughts on whatever’s been going on. on an unrelated note, did you know that biannual and semiannual are equivalent in meaning? english is wild. anyways, this foreword should’ve long been over.)

i remember writing a “thoughts on 2011″ pamphlet in winter break of sixth grade. it was literally just an 8.5″ x 11” sheet of paper halved into a program-esque thing, with an unnecessarily calligraphic “2011” drawn on the front and maybe two paragraphs or so of reflections written inside. it’s so weird to look back into the past because my main concerns in life were so completely different. example: when i moved to a new county  that year, i actively forced myself to be more extroverted, la razón por la cual being that i felt excluded from friend groups more often than not. seems like a figment of the past now, but in all honesty that decision has massively shaped who i am today.

i also used to be a lover of writing long rants on google+ (lol) on a wide array of topics. i still haven’t looked back at them, just because i’d prefer not to cringe more than i have to. but in all fairness, compared to what i write here now, those rants weren’t that different: they were just unadulterated flowery language, incessant tangents, and many attempts to make deep conclusions about my middle school struggles.

i wish i had written “thoughts on 20[xx]” pieces from 2012 through 2017, not only because they would be interesting windows into the past but also just for some good old scientific investigation. my hypothesis is that they’d be longer and longer essays, maybe growing quadratically with time to reflect all the accumulating experiences over the years… anyways, i digress.

but here i am, 300 words into a post about 2018, and i haven’t even begun talking about the current year yet. let’s fix that.

some thoughts on graduating

it is 10:10pm as i begin writing this, just over an hour since we all chucked our caps in the air at graduation. in an ideal world graduation would be some kind of epic ceremony — woo! accomplishment! happiness! celebration of everything in the past and everything that is to come!

but i just got home after the sky had gone completely dark, after running from eagle bank arena to the car under a rumbling thunderstorm, clutching in my gown a diploma i’ve slaved too long over to let touch a single raindrop. i’m not even attending angp, so i’m just hunched over my desk at home typing away on a laptop, but everything still seems a tiny bit surreal. school has become so deeply ingrained within me that i still feel like i’ll groggily wake up monday morning after sleeping through 50 alarms and pass out in the back of the bus while riding to the building i’ve spent many of my waking hours in for the past four years.

skewed: thoughts on the past year or so

i used to think that life would be a straight line.

sounds cheesy, but hear me out, okay? sure, we’re always told that “obstacles will get in your way” or “unexpected things will happen” or whatnot, but for whatever reason i always thought that my trajectory to life after high school wouldn’t veer at all. that i would sail seamlessly straight into my top choice college, that i would know exactly what i wanted to major in, that i would more or less have my life figured out by this point.

wew — boy, was i wrong.

thoughts on flying in a plane

there’s something about takeoff that never fails to impress me. maybe it’s the five-year-old in me being weirdly amazed by common modern phenomena like takeoffs, but i love ascending through the air at hundreds of miles per hour and watching entire city blocks shrinking into weirdly shaped tiles, massive lakes morphing into tiny puddles, an hour and a half in public transport’s worth of distance collapsing into a few centimeters. then everything starts fogging over and we shoot through the clouds into the stratosphere. speaking of which, i’ll never be able to look at clouds the same way after my thoroughly enlightening experiences studying geosystems (!!!).