2020, a year of reminders.

I have finals this upcoming week. My final final for my junior year of high school. After my final final, I will proceed to enjoy the last summer before my last year of high school. Time has passed quickly and so many pages of history have been rewritten for this year. My condolences are with the class of 2020, who have worked so hard throughout these past four years but have had a virtual graduation rather than one in person. 

But it would be tone-deaf to merely write about the academic world. Someone on the news last night from South Boston said that "2020 hasn't been too great for anyone." And I totally agree with that statement. It doesn't matter whether one is a student, an adult, or an elderly: our lives have been fundamentally altered. With 1 in 4 American workers out of a job, not only are recreational activities uprooted. Some people are struggling to put food on the table. Some want to go to work but cannot. Some can't go to work because schools aren't open. 

A deluge of problems seems to be arising in this country, COVID-19 and the protests over the murder of George Floyd this past week are two of the most substantial. I don't like to be political publicly, but the start of 2020 hasn't been looking too great for the United States on both an economic and social front. The protests over the murder of George Floyd have grown very violent over the past couple of nights. The administration hasn't helped in putting out the fires, with the president actually threatening to use violence against rioters. Stores have been looted and people continue to gather in the evenings in various major cities like New York, Minneapolis, LA, etc. throughout the country to protest. I'm wary of these protests, as they've even made their way into Boston. 

I don't know where I stand on this issue. Last night, the Minnesota governor activated the National Guard to quell the protests and keep people safe, something that has never been done before. I see why people are angry and why they have a right to keep protesting. One conscious person in this country cannot deny that history seems to keep relentlessly repeating itself and this country, no matter how hard it tries and no matter how many people die under police brutality, can't seem to shed itself of its racist past. The murder of George Floyd seems to have shaken this nation differently and people are violently mobilizing in ways we haven't seen in a long time in this country's history. These are the types of riots that will make the history books. They're the type of riots from which real change can emerge. 

Yet I am a pacifist. I don't enjoy seeing violence. People have been injured in these riots and people's lives are put at risk during these loots. Furthermore, the destruction that arises from these loots and riots is very great. For some people, the store they own on the corner lot is all they've got. Their family relies on this store to be open and it relies on this store to feed the family. But the protests have caused stores to unnecessarily close (yes, even in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic) and have resulted in sustained damages. Police stations have been burned and civic establishments, which have taken generations to establish, are now being burned to rubble. Is this really productive? The economic implications and dangers of these protests are beyond measurable. 

 

NASA and SpaceX also launched the first commercial spacecraft to the International Space Station, a feat that had yet to be accomplished. I watched the launch yesterday afternoon and it filled me with some satisfaction in our country's technological advancements and the changing landscapes of space exploration. 

This is really not how I could have imagined ending my junior year of high school. We've got a global pandemic, quarantine, riots, and a new rocket built partially by a private company at the International Space Station. Someone on Instagram made a post that said something to the effect of, I feel bad for the people learning 2020 history; it's a pretty hefty chapter. Perhaps it's not something to feel bad about. I think these events are part of the cycle of human experiences. They are a reminder that we are still human. It's a reminder that we are not invincible, as there are still diseases that we can't cure. It's a reminder that when people are angry and when the system we established to rule isn't being equitable, people will riot and express this anger. It's a reminder that if we put all of our brains together and unite our knowledge, we really can send people into space. 2020, a year of reminders.

Happy summer (whatever that means) :)

Things I love lately

I haven’t written one of these in a long time and I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in quarantine, thinking about life, stressing about the uncontrollable, and spending as much time as I can taking care of myself. 

Time has taken on a different phenomenon during these last three (almost four) months in quarantine. Days have grown increasingly longer. Time passes like a thick lotion filling a thin spouted flask. But the weeks have gone by like grains of sand falling through that same flask. Nonetheless, with these long days and short weeks, I’ve spent some time doing things I otherwise would not have the time for. 

Coursera.org. This has truly been a joy for me during the last couple of months. Coursera was founded by a Stanford professor years back and provides a platform for college courses online. There are courses in literally every imaginable field. I’ve found classes ranging from standard to specialization courses. I am particularly fond of taking online business/economic courses, which I find have substantially expanded my knowledge base in an area in which I already had developed an interest. But what I love more about Coursera is how it’s helped me expand my own interests. I’ve found courses on topics I never even knew people studied in such depth, such as war, game theory, and political morality. I think this platform has kindled my curiosity switch in a way I hadn’t felt before about coursework. 

Podcasts. I run every morning on the treadmill for about an hour. It gives me a natural kick and honestly isn’t as painful as running in the afternoon (maybe because I’m still a little groggy in the morning?). While running, I always listen to music at some point. But other days, if a new episode of a podcast comes out, I’ll give it a listen. Most podcast stations come out with around two new episodes every week, which gives me something to listen to on some days but all seven. I’ve generally been a pretty consistent Planet Money and WSJ Future of Everything listener. Lately, I’ve gotten into Freakonomics Radio, though their episodes are usually an hour-long so they only produce one a week. Podcasts have been really helpful in keeping up with the current economic situation and coronavirus pandemic. There’s a ton of news about the virus, US-China tensions, etc. on the news every day and I find it difficult to scout the best articles to read. I think podcasts summarize numerous sentiments in one neat, well-organized structure. An essential these days. 

ASMR Youtube Videos? These are no-talking videos that compile natural sounds that are super satisfying to listen to. I’m not sure how I first stumbled across these videos. I believe one with soap carving showed up on my feed one day and now I sometimes play ASMR as background noise. They induce relaxation and if you’re still not sure how they make you feel, it’s the opposite of how nails running down chalkboard makes you cringe :). I can’t say I’ve always been sensitive to sound. I have fairly sharp ears but I never honed my listening on such passing sounds, such as cutting soap, squeezing shampoo out of a fresh bottle, or tapping fingernails on a phone screen. Quite a way to relax!

Quarantine has been a time of lockdown undoubtedly. But it’s also been a time of discovery and rediscovery, just as there are two sides to everything. I hope you all are staying safe!

My grossly realistic, violently familiar, and randomly compiled non-systemic flows of thoughts

I've been remembering my dreams quite a lot lately. That previous sentence right there, I had to stop myself. I was about to write: I've been dreaming a lot lately. But apparently, humans dream every night, it's more a matter of whether we remember what we've been dreaming.

It's Sunday and I want to cap off this week reflecting on some of the grossly realistic, violently familiar, and randomly compiled non-systemic flows of thoughts in my unconscious self. This past week I've had so many awful, funny, and weird dreams that I'm concerned these are the consequences of changing sleep quality. And what's oddly scary is how detailed my dreams are. Unsure…sleep science is full of uncertainty as a whole.

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Earlier in the week, I dreamt I had participated in the murder of someone who was chasing me and my friends. This stunned me so much when I awoke. I rarely engage in violence in my dreams. In fact, I'm usually the one being chased in my dreams. But after my friends and I had stabbed the man, we knew we would be sent to jail so we ran to our town pool, located under shady trees at the foot of a small hill in a suburban neighborhood. At the town pool, there is a sky blue bathhouse with white wood planking. The walls were chipped and quite honestly looked abandoned. One of my friends told me that we had to escape to another world in order to avoid a conviction for our felony. Then we went to a bathroom stall and he told us to flush ourselves down the toilet. He demonstrated it first and told us to follow. I remember very clearly pressing the flush button on the wall but it not working at first. I heard police sirens in the background and new that my time was coming up. Then out of nowhere, I found myself in a weedy, apple picking farm. I was no longer wearing 21st-century clothes, but rather, 18th and 19th-century dresses. It was a floral patterned dress and felt like it weighed 20 pounds alone. Then we trudged through the grassy lanes towards a huge, stone mansion, similar to that of the Palace of Versailles, in the distance. I found myself slipping on the edges of the grassy mini hills. When we arrived at the house, I found tons of people in the house to my surprise. In fact, all of them were wearing 18th-century hats and the men were wearing white wigs. I found that all of them too had committed felonies but that we were protected from the outside world in this stone house and the apple picking field. Then I woke up.


The following evening, I dreamt about taking a soul cycle class on a tennis court at my local club. It was dark in the room, all except for a huge window from which emanated a disgustingly yellow light from the hallway. Anyway, I was biking with one of my friends from middle school. It wasn't very clear what happened next, but I found myself arranging mulch along the outer corner of my lawn. Just the outer corner. Not actually on the flower bed itself.

Another night, towards the end of the week, I dreamt that I was the empress of China. I don't know how that happened. But my family had sieged a temple from the previous ruling family and I found myself living in it. The temple seemed to have 10 floors, though each was very small and contained merely one room. The odd thing I remembered was that although each of these floors had merely one large room in the center of the floor, accessible only through the central staircase, there were at least 3 bathrooms on every floor, connected to all the bathrooms on the floor above and below. I remember exploring several different bathrooms. One was all grey, with a walk-in shower. Another had beige, sand-colored walls. The shower place was actually 3 steps lower than the main part of the bathroom and took up the entirety of the corner of the bathroom. I remember living on the 4th floor of the house, in a large room that was covered with royal blue wallpaper that boasted embroidered red and white zinnias. Then I found myself running because the temple we had just conquered was under siege again. I found myself hiding in the bathrooms and accessing new floors through these bathrooms rather than the central staircase. Quite an oddity.

Last night, I was in a historical hotel. It was not even a historic hotel. It was a castle. But I was not in the hotel for the pleasure of residency. Rather, I was in the hotel to save some rubies that legend said were located on the lowest floor of the castle (through the castle had 13 underground floors). I remember being followed at the airport by someone I knew. But by the time I reached the historic hotel/castle, it became clear that this stalker was set out to harm me. But I soon realized that this stalker had stolen the box of rubies that I sought to return to good hands, perhaps a museum. So my friends and I set out to explore the lower floors of the hotel. On the first lower floor was the hotel gym. Except it didn't look like a gym. Every machine was surrounded by black screeners so from afar, it appeared that the gym was a sea of black screeners. Then we continued on and on into the lowest floors of the castle. On the -12th,] I needed permission to enter the -13th. But thankfully, someone cranked the door open. It was a guard, who was sitting in a ticket-booth like structure by the door to the -13th floor. When my friends and I demanded he show us the box of rubies that we had to return to some museum, he pulled a huge box out of the wall on the -13th floor. Cautiously, holding our breath, we pushed off the lid to the huge box. Sure enough, inside were rubies. But also there was a mummy, on which the rubies were wrapped.

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Those are four of the dreams I remember most vividly this past week. I share with my parents every weird dream I have, such as these, and trust me, they're even weirder when spoken aloud. Anyway, if you've made it to this point in the article, hopefully, it means I haven't bored you with my dream recollection. It's funny how most of these dreams are loosely related to concerns and thoughts in my present-day but do not align exactly. Perhaps they're just my subconscious sorting through my thoughts that I can't recall through conscious hours. Maybe I'll never know.

The Lord of the Flies

This past week, I finished the classic The Lord of the Flies by William Golding. I am still on my classic novel reading journey and this is the fifth (?) book I've read in the last month and a half. This was my first time reading The Lord of the Flies. And given that I'm in high school, I'd say it's kind of late for the first read of such a notorious novel. I suppose that's my favorite part of reading classics, which I've come to really enjoy. The stories and themes they touch upon pervade long past their original dates of publication. They consist not of the type of storyline that "expires" after some length shelf-life; they can always be picked up again and reread.

------Spoiler alert!-----

The Lord of the Flies was brutal. It began on a negative note and didn't seem to end any more positively. A large group of boys is stranded on an island off the grid. They are divided into two groups, led by two leaders by different visions for the island. Initially, the boys put their faith in Ralph as the leader. However, the tides turn halfway through the novel when Ralph can't seem to achieve the structure and order he envisions. The boys turn their faith to Jack, an original school prep who started with a small but aggressive group of believers.

Upon reading The Lord of the Flies, I think two particularly dominant themes arose to me, the first of which being the notion of leadership. Ralph is certainly more of a visionary leader, an idealistic one who appreciates order and obedience. He is a long-term thinker. Throughout the novel, Ralph repeatedly calls order to the group of boys to maintain the fire. Ralph knows that producing smoke with a fire is the only way to attract and notify a passing ship of stranded human life. He also organizes different units and shifts for guarding the fire while organizing other groups to forge for food. The problem arose when the order unraveled. The young kids guarding the fire couldn't see the long-term benefit of what they were doing so they let the fire die in exchange for some fun swim time in the ocean. The people in charge of gathering food also gave up, as did the team delegated to build the shelters.

This lack of order resulted in the turn of the leadership from Ralph to Jack. Jack figured out how to butcher pigs on the island, providing an additional nutrient that plants and fruits gathered by Ralph's teams couldn't fulfill. I think the short term state, hunger, affected the boys' faith in the leadership. They couldn't understand Ralph's goals in maintaining a fire so they turned to Jack, who could slaughter pigs and provide food, an immediate benefit. I believe this is similar to elections for leadership in this country. Often it's not the best leader or visionary who is chosen; more often than not it's the person who can produce immediate, short-term improvements. I suppose this shows a potentially fatal flaw in our system and psychology. Drawn to short term benefits, I think it's important to continuously reference the long-term goal. As I read in The Lord of the Flies, what ultimately rescues the boys from the island is a Navy ship attracted by the heavy smoke from a forest fire started by Jack on his manhunt to kill Ralph.

The second important theme I noticed in The Lord of the Flies is the idea of law and order and its power in keeping up sane and human. Towards the end of the book, Jack and his followers (which was just about everyone except for a two people) had turned barbarous. They killed people, didn't wear clothing, and resolved to solve none of their problems on the island. All the while, Ralph was hiding out in the forest, he said:

"This was a savage whose image refused to blend with that ancient picture of a boy in shorts and a shirt" (165).

It seems that Golding is pointing to the pertinence of law and order. He suggests that it keeps us human, it maintains the divide between us and the animal world. It's a powerful statement and had the Navy not rescued the boys after Jack started the forest fire, they would have probably turned corrupt and murdered Ralph.

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The Lord of the Flies was a wonderful read. It was short, took me merely 4 days to finish. Yet it touches upon so many fundamental elements of humanity such as leadership and law. I think it's one of those stories with such vivid descriptions and a plot so unparalleled and sole that I have no doubt it will remain in my mind long after I've read it.

Some of the best advice I've ever received

This past fall, I came across a friend who recently graduated from Andover. We were spinning in the gym and we had a pretty awesome conversation. During this conversation, he gave me some of the best advice I've ever received. Though it was in the context of mindset towards college applications, I've found his advice to apply in contexts beyond just that. He told me:

"Get excited about every school on your list"

It turns out that personal excitement has been a really pivotal change. For me, this piece of advice has translated into a mentality shift. It's about seeing, and focusing, on the good in everything. It's about avoiding limitations to names and branding. It's about seeing everything as an opportunity to win, rather than deeming the entirety of an entity a total loss. In truth, almost nothing is a true total loss. I suppose it's a matter of perspective. There can be a commensurate negative outcome even in perceivably positive choices.

Perhaps most recently, the world has been suffering through the COVID-19 pandemic, a disease that has shredded through the very threads that hold together this country. In the midst of all the negativity in the world around the economic recession, the safety of first-line workers, and sky-high unemployment rates, a few articles have highlighted ways in which this sudden two-month lockdown has positively impacted our environment. Yes, COVID-19 is inevitably and irrefutably a global loss and tragedy. It's something no one should wish upon in the future and it's definitely not something to get excited about. Yet now that it's here and ripping around the globe, I think it was conscious for someone to put those articles out about the ways in which the fundamental changes driven by this pandemic have actually brought about some good. We can get excited about better air quality and less pollution.

"Get excited about everything I try"

That's probably how I would modify this piece of advice to fit the context of daily life. I've found the more excited I get myself about completing certain tasks/assignments, the better I perform and the most invested I become.

This past week, I turned in my History 310 paper. It's a notorious assignment, designed for the culmination of a year-long US history course. If I were taking classes at school, this paper would be 10+ pages, with ample other source requirements and depth of research. Though Andover has moved classes online, we were still required to submit a 310 paper. I got myself excited about the writing process in the beginning by choosing a topic of interest. That helped a lot. After, it was easy to do the research, gather sources, and write. And the key was that I learned so much. I broadened my perceptions about the dot-com bubble in ways I hadn't anticipated and it felt amazing to submit my paper on Canvas.

I would do it all again and I even have a second topic that I almost wish I had researched too. Just to fulfill my thirst to know why. To know why the world works the way it does. To learn why something happened one way and not the other.

Getting excited about everything is difficult, particularly when I enter the process with a prenotion. It's also difficult for me to abandon that prenotion and to inform myself that I may not have experienced the full picture of what a task entails. I never really enjoyed writing research papers until this year, starting with my winter term 7 page History paper. Something about personal investment and involvement makes the process a whole lot more intriguing.

Manifesting the desire to learn something new, which requires energy, is difficult. I think another thing I focused on is how learning something new will indirectly benefit me. Instead of making decisions on a whim, new knowledge in various areas would allow me to make calculated decisions backed by informed understanding. I guess this drives me to learn. Perhaps something else that drives me is the desire to have something to talk about. Knowing more about how the world works, and bringing that into a conversation where the other conversationalist brings his/her own knowledge too, makes for a better exchange.

Anyhow, it's been a long week. A regimented week, but nonetheless fast passing as time seems to behave in my world lately. Approaching novelty, I guess requires me to get excited…somehow :)