summer 2024

my first quarterly-report-update-blogpost

when i first started thinking about blogging one and a half years ago, i remember telling V that i wanted to blog because i wanted to write more. public accountability, i figured, would force me to be more introspective and thorough than my journals. i still think i write for the same reason. i’m writing for the sake of, or for the idea of, writing

this is my attempt to write more. more comfortably, more genuinely, more on a consistent basis—not just whenever i have a spurt of inspiration and write for an ~8-hour continuous block. i’m trying to be more comfortable with blogposts that are more along the lines of yep, here’s how my life is going right now. because maybe my writing ought to be more than emotional waves strong enough to spill out of me, because sometimes there is something deep hidden in the stochasticity of the every day, and of course because not everything is that deep

anyway, all of this is to say that i need to stop using my discomfort with imperfection as an excuse to not write. this seems silly when i know that probably around three people total read my blog and they’re all my friends. so here’s my first edition of my quarterly updates. my life is very seasonal and i’d like to see that more explicitly, so hopefully i’ll keep this up. maybe i will even make it monthly!

(ambitious thoughts when it is well past the end of summer; i’ve been procrastinating on this since i was in china a month ago)

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traveling and graduation feelings

if i could characterize my summer in a single phrase, this would be it. i’ve written plenty about these feelings in somber edgy posts throughout the summer, so i won’t go on about this for too long here. i’m sad about graduation and i’m still not over it. in hindsight, i shouldn’t be surprised: my first year was sabotaged by my breaking of the november rule, my second year was sabotaged by me not leaving my room and submerging myself in research, and my third year was also sabotaged by a series of unfortunate events in the fall, followed by graduate school visits and decisions and another big emotional rollercoaster in the spring, and then i decided to graduate early. and then boom, all of a sudden i was done with MIT, right when i felt like i was on the cusp of some potential equilibrium happiness

(i suspect that these sabotages are more a function of who i am as a person: there is no universe in which i am not sad and in disbelief about graduation. all paths lead to the person i am now in the aftermath)

i’ve also been traveling a lot this summer. i never traveled much during my undergrad because i was too busy or too stressed or too friendless or too antisocial to plan things, and it feels like i was making up for it all this summer. except often i was doing it without the friends, unlike a typical college break trip, which resulted in more somber edgy feelings. the feeling that stuck with me the most from my trip to japan was the explicit realization of how much joy from doing Fun Things comes from the friends you’re doing the Fun Thing with, rather than doing the Fun Thing itself. i felt this again in china. i was reliving my childhood in cold mungbean soup and corn juice from street stalls, drinking jasmine coconut lattes in cute cafés, and having the best vegan food i’ve ever had at buddhist temples, and sometimes i would still be unhappy. there’s a lot to unpack as to why, but it mostly surrounds being cutoff from friends (no internet), never being in control, and weird and inescapable interactions with family and relatives. the worst part of my summer came from relatives who were being homophobic out of the blue because they had consumed so much anti-american media? (a lot to unpack, i know)

i think the highlight of my summer was going to san francisco for two weeks in july. during my grad visits i had decided that the place i wanted to live in the most in the world was berkeley/SF, and there are many reasons why: sunlight and trees and birds, hippie California vibes, public transportation, and because V is there right now

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home

when i wasn’t traveling, i was home in san diego. i was extremely apprehensive about this: i had not been home for a period longer than ~3 weeks since i had left for MIT. i guess i have a lot of complex feelings about home, as probably most people do. when i think of home i still think of the house on beacon street across from MIT, although i’m a bit less attached to that now than i was a few months ago

home is something that i take easily for granted. it was easy to take my home at MIT for granted: there were a lot of things that i had grown tired of, i was having some problems with my housemates, and so on. i felt that i was more than ready to graduate and move on. but one day in early may, the idea of truly, really graduating hit me for the first time. i was walking out the front door, making eye contact with myself in the dirty mirror near the front entrance as i did every day. and then i thought about all the outfit checks and group mirror photos and all the times i had smiled faintly at the welcome reflected on my forehead, scrawled in pastel marker, coming back after a long day. i thought about how one day i will walk out this door and then none of the doors i will ever walk out of will be this one. that day i collapsed and cried on the front steps for, as i realized then, the only home i’ve ever had

because home home often doesn’t feel like home. the only home i’ve ever had sounds like an exaggeration, and maybe it is, but what i mean by that is it’s the only home that the current self-perceived iteration of myself, emotions and self-awareness and all, has had

but i think that’s changing, bit by bit. for one, i’m more grounded in who i am, now; i have MIT to thank for that. because of this, it’s a bit easier to feel at home in different spaces. for a long time, home home (san diego) used to feel very unsafe because it felt like a rewind to a 16-year-old version of myself: i struggled to bring the productive habits and healthy communications and mental health supports back to this place where many of these problems had originated. to put it bluntly, i held my parents responsible for so many of the problems that i didn’t realize were problems until i went to college, and i didn’t have the freedom or control to resolve this anger under parental supervision

to some extent i’ve always seen my parents as more than human. maybe it’s because they’ve always presented themselves as sources of authority, or maybe it’s because they literally made me, and holding them responsible for something that to me has infinite magnitude is maybe a little unfair. growing up over the past few years has meant recognizing that my parents are human, that they’re allowed to make mistakes, that they came to a foreign country with no one but ourselves, that being sixteen and being the age that they were when they became parents is now about equally distant. moreover, it has meant believing in the person i am right now, instead of that distorted projection of myself that is the product of the home i grew up on. this summer, the urge to escape that version of me has faded significantly. i’m trying to learn that version of love where we care fiercely for each other, regardless of how incorrigibly misaligned our values are. my mom and i still fight, but the scales are more or less equal: we are just two people making mistakes, wishing we could be kinder to each other

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goal realignment

leaving a place filled with rituals and routines i had accumulated over the years has allowed me to examine my goals and motivations, and explicitly re-prioritize. the biggest change i’ve made is being less rigid about going to the gym. i had already started this indirectly when i chose to go vegan in january, and in the process, try to change my eating habits which had become too rigidly optimized around hypertrophy training. but until this summer, it was difficult to change my gym routine, which had become so habitual that it had become a pillar for my mental health

i’m trying to be more comfortable with doing mediocre exercise, just as i am trying to be more comfortable with more ordinary writing. but unlike writing, i’ve known for a while that i don’t really actually care about being extremely fit: i just want to be an okay level of fit. i like to feel good exercising and i like to have enough functional strength to lift and open things without help, and maybe it would be cool to do a pull-up with good form, but the bar for this is much lower than my gym routine had been putting me to. moreover, what i explicitly don’t want is for exercise to be attached to my body image, and unfortunately that’s pretty much the whole goal of hypertrophy training. so now, i go to the gym when it’s convenient to, and i don’t feel too bothered when i don’t go. i’m excited by all the new exercise possibilities that have opened up from my gym time freeing up

in general, whenever i do something i tend to go to the extreme: either i have to do it perfectly or not at all. i wanted to show myself that i could be good—great—at anything if i wanted to—it’s a delicate balance of insecurity and arrogance. but now, i want to try working towards something in proportion to how important it is to me, rather than giving my all to everything (and then being able to do very little)

a tentative prioritization of time allocation goes: research and intellectual growth ≳ close friends > writing > exercise > leisure activities (games/reading/cooking/fashion) > new potential hobbies. i’m trying to figure out where talking to new friends or acquaintances fits in: i usually don’t enjoy it, but i want to believe in its potential. and of course i need to slot in necessities as needed: there is probably some minimum threshold of real-life socialization and doomscrolling that i need to feel normal and okay

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miscellaneous updates

i got my first tattoo, a second lobe piercing, and a haircut. i finally successfully grew out my front bangs (mostly). i did my first pull-up, although my form isn’t very good. i had my first MRI and it was very loud and very long. i re-learned the physics behind magnetic resonance imaging. i discovered that crispy mushrooms are a extremely good snack. i discovered that it is impossible to make crispy mushrooms yourself because you need a vacuum fryer. i did shrooms and it was fun but not particularly illuminating. i now identify as nb (they/she/he), although i honestly don’t care that much how i’m addressed

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future thoughts

i’m cheating a little because i’m writing this from the “future” already: my move to germany marked the end of this summer. it’s been almost 3 weeks since i’ve been here now, but many of my feelings from the summer are still the same. i’m still apprehensive about this year. it’s fall, not winter yet; i’m scared of november—i always am. the feeling of missing home has hung over me ever since i graduated, and it’s been there in the background for so long that i feel as though i’ve occupied some permanent state of limbo. i guess that is true, given that my stay in germany is relatively short, probably shorter than the timescale i need to really feel at home in a foreign country

sometimes i feel like i’m in a dream: nothing really anchors me to reality. i spend most of my waking hours in some theoretical space about cross-correlations and matter density fields. usually, it’s always my friends that remind me how real we are. i feel so, so lucky that i get to call my friends on a regular basis despite the time zones. i don’t want my friends to become theoretical, too, trapped behind a rectangle of pixels. my friends are getting off work when i go to sleep and are sleeping when i wake up; sometimes the incongruity of our lives makes me feel as though we are separated by entire timelines

it’s fall now and i’ve fallen into a chasm of infinite depth; everything is getting faster and farther away and i’m suspended in the air, absolutely still, as i hurtle to the ground

i miss you. i miss when we were separated by a cup of coffee instead of an ocean. i miss taking a walk with you, knowing we are feeling the same breeze, the same sun, the same world. and i miss saying goodbye to you after a hangout, where your disappearance is gradual and not instantaneous destruction, where when i turn around and walk away there is a huge smile plastered on my face because i can’t can’t fucking wait to see you again