Moving

This upcoming week, my family will be relocating. We're staying in the Greater Boston metropolitan area though, so it won't be a massive difference in terms of location. 

As the days creep closer to move out day, I'm starting to feel a little nostalgic. I didn't expect to feel this way. I've been wanting to move a while, thinking a little change is always good. I've never moved before and I'm going to be 18 this year. The fact that I've never lived elsewhere, or will I probably ever live in a single house for as long as I have in this one, comes as a bit of a shock. 

I also think about the running and walking routes I've established throughout my town over the years. I know these routes by heart and by mileage. I always know where I'm going and I can speak with confidence that I can navigate most areas of town easily. But this will take a while to become accustomed to in our new town. It's a lot larger first of all, and secondly, I've never really spent a significant portion of time in that part of Massachusetts. I'm excited though. Walking through the neighborhood, I've begun to map out where everything is, how the streets are connected, and how I can get most easily from place to place. 

I've never been deeply connected to my current town, but even then, I'm familiar with it. The mere comfort I feel walking through town, knowing exactly where every store is, and exactly what every store sells is beautiful in itself. Yet when I think about all I don't know about my new town, I suppose there's an adventure around every corner. 

Finally, it's the way I know my own house. It's a familiarity I will have to relocate. At night, I don't need a light and I find the door from my bed. I can locate how close my bed is to the window even in the dark.

Nonetheless, I'm excited for some change. This is a pivotal moment in our lives for so many reasons. On top of what's happening in the world and in my family, I'm also a rising senior. It's like a wave of things just hitting at once but resuming peace once the wave passes. We're at the top of that wave right now. 

One of the hardest realizations

One of the hardest realizations I've come to accept lately is that a "before" and "after" of COVID-19 will be apparent. 

This week, I began taking an online course called the Future of the Business World, tailored to the recent happenings globally surrounding the health pandemic. I've completed just my second day of the two-week program and it's become quite apparent that the world of business will change. And beyond business, it seems that life will no longer return to the pre-COVID identical state in any industry. Retail will be different. Will people have to shop virtually? (imagine shopping at Bloomingdales and virtually riding up the elevator and walking around the jean section) It's likely that remote work will become more substantial within the upcoming years, as it's possible for nearly 32% of our current workforce to work from home? I suppose this remote work trend has been taking root for several years already and COVID-19 has merely accelerated its necessity. Touchless pay programs like Apple Pay will likely take on greater usage, as well as automation which builds economic resiliency. What about remote school? How will we have to rethink education so ensure similar or better quality of learning? It's quite staggering to see how middle and elementary students are expected to retain only 70% of their reading gains and just 50% of their mathematical advancements made this past year due to the extended summer and therefore fewer hours spent in school. 

I've been grappling with all these trends we may see within the next couple of years and it's hard to imagine that there really will be a new normal. Restaurants will be operating at a lower capacity. You might not be able to go to sporting events. Sports themselves may change during the season, particularly with contact sports like football. 

What's perhaps most amazing to me is how technologically and societally advanced humans are given our ability to adapt and how helpless we suddenly become during this pandemic. Humans have evidently lost a degree of control during this pandemic, something few things have been able to do. These are clearly unprecedented times. Unprecedented times with a before and an after. Sometimes I imagine I'm in the future remembering the pre-COVID life, how we used to eat indoors at restaurants and be able to see peoples' faces when we passed them on the streets. That would be a drab reality. 

The Grapes of Wrath: one of my favorites of all time

Last week, I finished The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. I'm going to be 18 years old this year. I'm going to be graduating high school this year and I just finished a full-year course on US History of which an essential component was the Great Depression of the 1930s. It's about time I took a look at The Grapes of Wrath. 

Agitating. That's how I would describe how many parts of the book made me feel. It angers me how migrants were treated. All they wanted was a little bit of land. A little bit of food. But they were ostracized, deemed "Okies" and insufficient to live a decent life. "And while the Californians wanted many things, accumulation, social success, amusement, luxury, and a curious banking security, the new barbarians wanted only two things–land and food" (233). Steinbeck organizes The Grapes of Wrath in a back-and-forth narration about one family and brief, philosophical interludes. Page 233 is part of that interlude between the narrations of the Joad family. These interludes are what agitated me the most. They have a minimal amount of speech but are deluged with rich descriptions about the western lands, the Dust Bowl, the famine, and most importantly, how Okie families reached out to help each other during their journey west. At first, I was quite confused as to why Steinbeck chose to organize his novel with the disconnected narration and the interludes. I later realized that he chose to "disconnect" the reader from the Joad story with interludes and speak more broadly about issues of inequality because the Joad's are one family that represented hundreds of thousands of other families moving westward. That's what makes The Grapes of Wrath so grand: it simultaneously tells the story of one family while representing the experiences of hundreds of thousands of others who wanted nothing more than a little land and some food for their families. 

Disgusting. Another adjective to describe how I felt at particular parts. What drew the most repulsion from me was when the police officers intentionally planned to wreak havoc in the government camp, which they otherwise couldn't enter. During one of the weekend dances, a man snuck into the camp and tried to cause a riot over choosing a dancing partner, which, as planned drew the police to the gates of the community. I was also very much disgusted by how the police officers treated the migrants, degrading them to anything but human. And this is quite a timely statement, considering the ongoing protests against police brutality in our nation today. As I was reading The  Grapes of Wrath, I couldn't help but think, wow, one hundred years later the system still has not changed. Police brutality isn't new. It's a flaw in our institution that existed even during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

One of the most important themes I took away from The Grapes of Wrath was dignity and insistence upon being treated like a human. The inequality that eroded the 30s society was fueled in part by people's need for basic necessities like food but also by people, who were economically marginally ahead of the majority, and their desire to maintain whatever difference existed. This is why I was touched when the migrants began helping each other. Families would reach out and share what little food they had left and they would travel together to find work. 

I was honestly surprised by the mellow ending Steinbeck chose. I thought the book would end more in a tragic light, similar to Of Mice and Men. But I suppose the Joads – or the migrants, rather – and their desire to preserve whatever decency they may have left allowed some of them to just make it. I will never forget the stress I felt as a reader learning that the Joads were once again on the road to find work. I think in total they must have found around four to five jobs, none of them prolonged or well paying due to the influx of migrants wherever the slightest inkling of labor could be performed for an even smaller sum of wages. "When there was work for a man, ten men fought for it… If that fella'll work for thirty cents, I'll work for twenty-five. If he'll take twenty-five, I'll do it for twenty" (283).  But the Joads never lost their sense of humanity or dignity throughout the book. Even in times of struggle, they maintained what they felt to be the right thing to do. In times of crisis, they epitomized what it means to be human, even when others don't treat you like one. 

This is one of those novels you don't stop thinking about when you're done. Certain scenes are still clear in my head, thanks to Steinbeck's vivid descriptions, and I can still almost feel the emotions of the characters in particularly dire situations. I rarely read a book and think wow as I'm reading it. Every chapter in The Grapes of Wrath simply had so much content and so much to absorb both intellectually and emotionally. As Penguin Classics wrote: "perhaps the most American of American classics". 

The next chapter of your life

"You cannot start the next chapter of your life if you keep re-reading the last one" -Michael McMillan

Farewell to 2020

Farewell to the class of 2020. Yesterday, they officially graduated from Andover. 

I've written about this before but it's odd to me how high school brings youth from every corner onto one campus for four years. During probably the four most formative years of our lives, we grow tight-knit even as the grades above and below us form their own generalizations about the character of our class. People in the class form friendships and alliances with each other and some even go so far as to declare a serious relationship. For four years. Four years of strenuous learning, development, and growth later, a class parts from the steps of Samuel Phillips Hall. Clusters of people will end up going to universities in close proximity geographically and others will permanently end ties by virtue of career and location. Nonetheless, it intrigues me how Andover becomes the commonality between people who continue a brewing friendship and those who never see each other again. It's as if we all have something to hold onto that brings us back to 180 Main St.

Granted that we return to campus in the fall, my class will become the senior class. Though crazy to think about now, every year is just part of a cycle. It's a cycle that doesn't stop, with a new graduating class every single year. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that eventually 2021 will be the graduating class in that cycle. Being the oldest people on campus will be odd too. I've noticed how the seniors typically live in their own little bubble. It seems that after college apps, which take up the better part of the fall and winter, people are so "out of it" that it's hard to regain their footing and keep doing Andover. 

I'm excited for the class of 2020, though I was never able to fully say goodbye or congratulate my friends in that class. I hope these amends can be made in the near future. 

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.

___________________

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.

_____________________

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.

------------------------

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 :)