mental manifestations

Being out of school for one year now has really changed a lot in the way I live. The “college life” is not one I can really do anymore. There are so many things that I just don’t do anymore. I’m losing interest in primetime television shows similarly how I eventually lost interest in Saturday morning cartoons when I was younger. There are hardly any games worth my time anymore (except for Nintendo and a few other handfuls). I’m starting to rediscover again how much crap I’ve collected and don’t need. I don’t try to be a stupid, cheap idiot as opposed to being frugal (big, big difference), and I don’t really do random things anymore. The whole lifestyle I had in college — one that everyone falls into just because it’s the thing to do (seriously, just go to Stuff College People Life) — isn’t who I am anymore.

Things change and lose their charm, and we eventually have to grow up. Maybe not now, but at some point. The college lifestyle isn’t really one I would want to jump back into anyway. When I was in my later years of college, I had gone on co-op for a long time with only one quarter of summer classes. By the time I had returned back to campus, the world I was accustomed to there felt so different and alien even with the few familiar pieces. I felt so old seeing all the young and inexperienced freshmen. I realized at some point in college that I would have to make some sacrifices in order to focus on my growing academic workload.

In a way, leaving college was similar to leaving high school. You think you’re ready for the road ahead, and yet there is still so much you don’t know. Then suddenly you’re just tossed into a different situation, and now you have to figure out things all over again. Looking back at high school students now, they are so young and inexperienced just like we were once. I’m now starting to have to deal with more grown-up things that the cocoon of college doesn’t really prepare you for — the kinds of things you don’t learn in classrooms. The freedom is there, but it is not something I have really had to deal with before.

I’m starting to appreciate shared human experiences more and more despite the “socialness” of the web and new emerging technologies. Now I’m starting to look at the housing market (seems like a great time to buy), considering graduate school a little seriously, thinking about the stock market, and trying to take care of myself in general (while I’m still living at home with my parents). There is still a lot of growing up I have to do, and that’s the part I don’t like.

Disclaimer: I may speak generally, but this is really from my perspective. It is by no means a declarative statement on the world.

It has been approximately three months now that I have been in the so-called “real” world that comes after graduation. Even so, I’m still not really fully living on my own. I am currently staying with my parents for a while saving up some money (and paying off student loans) before I really decide to move out. I have almost no real expenses save gas which takes a chunk out of my monthly income since I have to drive approximately 80 miles round-trip between work and home. Other than that, life does not feel that much different than when I was on co-op and still a student in college. I get up each day, go to work, and then go home. Instead of being paid hourly, I have a salary plus benefits. I still hang out with my friends and go out from time to time.

Adjustment to this “real” world was initially difficult for me. It took me about a month before I started to feel somewhat comfortable with the life I had chosen. Plus I was coming off an entire summer of being free from any responsibilities. I traveled a lot and visited lots of friends. So when I had to buckle down come September (when a lot of people I knew were going back to school), I was very unwilling to face the reality of becoming a true adult.

The worst part of my daily routine is the commute. Driving to work can take at least an hour during rush hour traffic, and that was usually the biggest factor that would leave me in an upset mood every time I came home when I first started working. I would question the choices I made and whether they were right or wrong. I would ponder all the “what if” questions of taking a different path. I felt very lost, because I had no guidance on what to do with my life for the very first time. I’m more used to life now, but I don’t think the commute is something I could do forever. I will have to eventually move closer to work, find a new job closer to home, or both. That is still a ways off from now though.

Adjusting back to my home city has also been weird. In Rochester, you could get anywhere — restaurants, movie theaters, museums, anything — within a relatively reasonable amount of time. Boston has way too many cars; this city was not meant for driving. Friends are all over instead of concentrated in one area (i.e. the university). There is no Wegmans, no Dibella’s, no white hots, no “talking” to the deaf lady who works at the bank every time I go there, and I haven’t had the same customer service experience as I had at John Holtz Honda. I do miss Rochester at times because it was the place where I started to make a life for myself without the protective shield of my parents. In a way, I feel more connected with Rochester in a more community-oriented way. Living and growing up in Boston, I mostly confined myself to my school which is where I grew up the most. I haven’t found that same niche in Boston as the one I carved out in Rochester. There are plenty of things to do and see in Boston, but I just haven’t had the time to really explore all of them.

Of course, there have been positive aspects of moving back home. I’m finally starting to catch up with old high school friends even if I don’t see them that often. I started doing kung fu and tai chi at a school that is run by a friend I have known at the American Red Cross for a while. It’s been nice seeing all the people I missed while I was away at school in Rochester. I feel like it’s a good thing that I moved back home instead of another city where I would have to start another life all over again. The sense of belonging that I get from others is what keeps me going strong in life.

In the future, I don’t know what I will do. Perhaps I will move around to another city, but I think that is not very likely (at least for a while). I just can’t leave Boston yet due to my emotional attachment to people (and the city itself). My original plan was to move back home, stay for a while, then possibly leave. I’m starting to feel like I might not leave unless I had a very compelling reason to do so. I had originally intended my time during the summer to discover more about the world and myself and what I want to do with my life. That plan never came to fruition, and it might never given my habits of laziness.

Life always seems to move more quickly the older we become. The increasing exponential perception of time as we age makes us feel like there is never enough of it. The past five years in college have been so dramatically different that the six years I spent in a college preparatory school. I have changed a lot, but still quintessentially the same inside. I know that whatever choices I will make, good or bad, things usually work out for themselves. That is the one reality I have known all my life.

I have been doing kung fu and tai chi for a little over a month now, and I am picking things up quite quickly (so I’m told). I guess after looking back on my life, I have always had the ability to pick up most things in a short amount of time. However, this was not always the case. When I was younger, I fumbled around with any physical activity. I didn’t really understand kickball until the third grade when I just walked up and started playing despite having heard the rules so many times before. A few years later was when I started to discover how to put power into my kicks and start playing the outfield much better. I never really learned how to ride a bike though others have tried to teach me; I just picked it up and started riding it one day like it was nothing. Learning some basic martial arts during my early adolescent years came easily despite my lack of progression (due to schoolwork). After starting college, playing volleyball came almost naturally. Dodgeball was just pure instantaneous physical reaction often times having me end up as one of the last players to be hit out. For most of my life, I had also played the piano, and my ability grew tremendously. The first time I went water-skiing (basic instruction) in Greece, my instructor thanked me for making his job easier. My instructor on my first driving lesson (in Boston) said he was really impressed. I finished all my on-road lessons and got my license within two weeks. Even simple origami I could master faster than most people I knew.

After evaluating all the physical things that I can personally do well, it seems like I learned how to connect my body and mind to make them work together. Yet I am still limited given how my brain is wired (which is story for another day). Everything that I have learned to do physically is quite static. If I try to play basketball, where the dynamics of the sport are constantly changing, I will stumble around with dribbling, running around players, passing, and shooting. Even with playing the piano, I learned quickly how to play with my first teacher. With my second piano teacher, it was more refining my technique. It wasn’t until many years later with my third teacher that I finally understood that playing and making music is different. That was when she told me to sing with the piano. With all the physical rules laid out for what my body needs to follow, my mind is capable of handling all the stimuli on the backend. When the inputs start changing faster than my mind can process, my body will shut down and become non-responsive.

This isn’t to say that I couldn’t learn certain sports or physical activities at some point in life. I may perceive them as more difficult for me personally, but much practice and hard work can pay off. Something I find easy to do may give hard times for others. The mental-physical connection that I have is a trade-off in my experience. Thinking too much will diminish my physical performance whereas pure physicality results in lots of failed attempts with no understanding why. The “how” comes easily for me, but the “why” is often lost. What I need to do is start to train my mind to take what I know or learn and apply that in more creative and expanded ways. It’s not an easy process being rooted so strongly in rules, but at least it’s a fundamental base to start with as things usually go.

It’s nice to be home again even with all the differences between now and the city I grew up in.

I’m starting my fourth week in my full-time salaried job working as a software engineer. It’s been difficult adjusting to such the working life (as opposed to student life) especially since I accepted the offer and started so quickly. It is so much different than being on a co-op where I was paid hourly. In my salaried position, I am expected to put in a minimum of 40 hours and as many as necessary to complete my work while being paid the same no matter what. My current commute also takes up a lot of my daily time and fuel. Life just isn’t like what it was before; dealing with such a drastic change has been very hard for me.

A few weeks ago, I was desperately trying to hold on to what fleeting “freedom” I had left. I was fresh out of school, took the whole summer off visiting friends, going to Europe, moving back home, and having tons of fun. The only thing I could do is enjoy what I had. I’ve decided to take up kung fu and tai chi in my spare time to keep myself sane and not thinking about work all the time. So far it’s worked out pretty well, and I’m really enjoying what I’ve been learning so far.

My life each day consists of work and either kung fu or tai chi. I don’t get home until at least past 9 PM on most days. My parents are letting me stay with them for a while until I save enough money to get my own place. There are still many responsibilities of “being an adult” that I have not dealt with on my own yet (insurance, car payments, etc.), but have gotten a taste of when I moved off-campus in my college years.

My sister has gone off to college, and her absence has been weird since she left. I expect her to walk up the stairs at any moment at which point I would say something random and wacky to her. The silence is somewhat uncomfortable, but I imagine this is what life was like when I left for college five years ago. I still have friends who are going to school in Rochester, and it makes me sad that I cannot easily go and hang out on a whim at any time. I still have friends here at home, old and new, but it isn’t the same especially now that most of us are so busy with regular life. I’m starting to understand how some people have felt when they left college and moved to other areas not knowing anyone after building up all those relationships so tightly after the past years.

As much as I’m dreading so much change in such a little amount of time, I need to see this all out. What has happened in these past few weeks only play into the longer run, the big picture of what the future will be. My problem is that I want my life to be “perfect” (satisfactory enough) right now instead of earning it or waiting for it to happen and let things be. My life has no definite goal or end (like graduation or such) that I can see anymore. This really is the first day of the rest of my life. There is plenty of time in life to be patient for the things we want the most.

Disclaimer: A lot of the observations I make in this post are general trends I have personally observed or experienced. What I say is not absolute, because I have also seen exceptions.

There is a post over at 8 Asians that has been bothering for me some time, but I haven’t had the chance to formulate a thought-out response at the time. The issue that the post revolves around is interracial dating between Asian and Caucasian people. What bothers me the most is that the response to the issue feels too generic and stereotypical. What someone says in a few words about “typical” Asian males definitely does not encompass the entire spectrum. The reason it bothers me a lot us because it is opposite from what I have seen. People’s lives are so hugely influenced by their environment and social dispositions.

I was born and rasied in Boston. I lived in an Irish neighborhood. I really never saw a huge Asian population until 7th grade. Up until then, I went to schools that were predominantly white or of other minorities (black, Hispanic, etc.), and my only contact with other Asians were family, Chinatown visits, or the small percentage of students in school. 7th grade was a big change for me; I entered an extremely diverse school of over 2400 students where my graduating class was at least 300 students. Yet I never hung out with the Asian kids. They were generally cliquey, and I never shared any interests with them. This just doesn’t apply to Asian people. I’ve seen the phenomenon in so many other groups of people. People always banded with others who were of the same race because the familiarity and similarity makes them feel comfortable and safe. It always bothered me when others tried to latch onto me because I was Chinese (like when someone wants to be a project partner or a random person sits next to me on the bus).

I always hung out with people who shared the same interests as as me which almost all the Asians I knew never did. I always loathed people who would try to make me join some Asian culture society at school. These are the same kind of people who hang out in the same Asian clique. I have no objections for sharing my heritage and celebrating my culture, but it seems silly when all the attendants just happen to be of the same culture. I was never taught racism when I was growing up. I never inherited it from my parents. I had to learn it from all the social situations I was in. My social confusion screwed me up for a long time, before I learned how to just be myself. However, the exposure I had to other people showed me that we really aren’t that different if you strip skin color away. Character — what people said or did to me good or bad — always struck me more than anything.

I only ever really dated one girl who happened to be Korean. Her past boyfriends were all white (if I remember correctly). She came from a white suburb and grew up in a different setting than most other Asians I knew. However, she was not the kind of girl I would date again. It had nothing to do with physical appearance at all. Her character just didn’t cohere with mine which is why I broke up with her. My cousins have married various people of other races (Italian, Korean, Spanish), and there are no issues with race with anyone there.

I have met some really great and nice people throughout my life. It didn’t matter what race they were, because I knew them as individuals instead of abstracting them into a global group and personifying that. Taking interracial dating so seriously is dumb. The people who do that probably have some insecurities they need to take care of. In the end, people should do whatever makes them happy regardless of race.

I was never good at saying goodbyes. I have now completed my undergraduate degree in Computer Science from RIT after five long years of hard work, co-ops, and fun. And yet, I know that life will still go on. I had this same experience when some of my friends graduated before me. I had this same feeling right before I moved to Maryland. I had this feeling before I left Maryland to move back to Rochester. Still, saying goodbye never gets any easier.

I suppose it’s a good thing to reflect on the things since I was a freshman in college and see how I’ve progressed. I know that I will have plenty of pictures to remind me of all the memories and experiences I’ve had. I’ve become a little smarter. I’ve learned new things, good things, bad things, and different things. I’ve become slightly more fit. I’ve become a greater person than I was when I graduated high school, but it never really feels any different.

The epic feeling dissipated quickly after my ceremony in much the same way it did after my high school graduation. Everything passes so quickly and there is never a good chance to let it soak in. I received one of my project grades only fifteen minutes after my ceremony ended from a professor in my department who was at the ceremony. I can’t imagine what faculty feel, but I would bet it has become a very common occurrence for them.

I can’t find the right words to convey what I want. To sum up my entire college experience in a few mere paragraphs just feels too cheap to do it justice. You can’t capture that sense in recount the same way you experience life live in reality. A casual drive around campus makes me a lot more emotional than sitting here in my apartment trying to let go. All the preparation in the world can never prepare you for the reality of life. The books my mom bought me about college after I graduated from high school did not help me much at all. A lot of life I had to take as it came along and learn from it.

It was all the people that helped me grow into who I am now. Going to college was vastly different than going to high school. There were so many people from different backgrounds, and I managed to carve out my niche and find a good group of people that I call my friends. Even the people in passing, ones I never got to know very well, from jobs, classes, or clubs, contributed to the madness of college whether that madness was fun, laughter, anger, or sadness.

At the end, it never feels like I did enough. It never feels like I tried hard enough. I could have done more. I could have done better. But life will always have more time for me to make up for everything I didn’t do. I do not expect to see some people for a long time just like I didn’t expect to see a lot of my high school class for a while. Letting go is hard to do, but it doesn’t mean I have to forget. My life doesn’t have to end here at graduation. It’s just a period of transition. And life is nothing but a neverending, continuous period of transition.

Sometime during May 2006, I randomly decided to watch Yu-Gi-Oh. I developed some interest in it my late senior year in high school and kept regular track of it into my second year of college. By that time, I stopped watching it since it had gotten so repetitive and drawn-out. Anyway, as I was waiting for Yu-Gi-Oh to come on, I was flipping through the various Saturday morning cartoons. Most of them seemed drab and unentertaining to me. Then I started thinking about all the cartoons I had watched during my childhood and even late into my adolescent years. The amount of cartoons I had watched steadily decreased the older I became. I compared these new cartoons to the ones in my past viewing experience and deemed my past better than the present.

My mind wandered to other topics such as music. Songs that were popular in 1996 (and some of which I still like listen to occasionally) are no longer played on the radio (except for very rare instances). That really made me feel old. 10 years ago I was in the sixth grade and was 12 years old. I thought about the video games I used to play and compared them to today’s games. It’s hard for me to evaluate today’s games by today’s “standards” since they are so different now. It’s easy to see the evolution that has taken place, but I find it difficult to keep up with it. As a result, I dismiss mostly every game and gamer child (anyone born in the 1990’s and later) as “bad” since they are nothing like the “old days” of my youth.

I am only 21 years old. I am still young in some respects, but just thinking about that viewpoint made me feel so old. I really understood what the generation gap was and what it felt like to be “old” and how today’s current generation is so different. I hope in time, they will come to realize the same thing. I personally have never thought that I would reach such a conclusion, but I suppose it was bound to happen eventually. It is our past (particularly our younger years) that are so formative and developmental in who we are today. Once that ground foundation is set, breaking apart and starting over is a really hard thing to do. I guess this is all part of becoming an adult.

Technically, I am still a student at RIT, but while I’m here in Maryland, I am a full-time hourly-paid employee for the University of Maryland. I haven’t spent as much time here as I have at RIT, so campus can still feel alien to me even at the locations I frequent like the gym and the student union. That’s because I don’t go to school here. Working at UMD hasn’t fostered the same kind of personal growth that I would normally get if I were attending school here as a full-time undergrad.

However, I have managed to still fit in and adjust easily. Despite my feelings of being disconnected from the student body here, I haven’t completely shaken off my status as a student. I currently live off-campus with two other guys who are students at the University of Maryland. I have a friend (that I met at RIT) here in graduate school, and I’ve hung out with him and a bunch of his friends. It’s nice to just be in that carefree atmosphere and have a good time. My co-workers are also young too, and fitting in with them has been easy ever since I arrived here.

I haven’t let go of my student stature, but I haven’t fully become a member of the working class yet. I guess I’m in a transitional state right now, but haven’t fully detached or attached to either side. I’m not sure what my life would have been like had I taken another job at some corporation. I don’t think I would experience the same environment or interact with the kind of people I currently do. The way I imagine it, I think my life might have been a lot less interesting.

As part of the Computer Science program at RIT, students are required to complete four quarters (a quarter is 3 months long) of full-time work experience relevant to the field of Computer Science. I started my co-op at the beginning of December and am continuing it until the end of May. I am working at the University of Maryland for Michael Cummings in the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology which is part of the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies. Ever since I started my job at UMD, I have found life to be very different than I have normally been accustomed to during college.

One of the biggest differences is that the amount of free time you have decreases a lot. In school, class schedules vary day to day, but there is always time to do something. The time I spent in class is much less than the time I spend at work. Granted that part of my time outside of class is doing work for the class, there was always leisure time to go out for a few hours and hang out with friends. Invariably, time is the fundamental element that structure how I live in Maryland.

I spent about 8 hours at work from the morning until early evening. Part of this time is spent preparing for my day at work (i.e. trying to wake up to a conscious state so I can drive there). At the end of the day, I don’t necessarily have the same “freedom” that I would normally feel getting out of class or when the school day is over. There is usually something “important” I have to do when I come home. Whether it’s paying bills, taking care of chores, running errands, making my dinner, or finishing up some work at home, such tasks rank higher on the list of priorities. Once I take care of everything I need to, I either watch TV or muck around on the Internet. I don’t spend as much time doing so as I used to in college. Sometimes I get wiped out at work and all I want do is sleep. Other times, if I want to go out and do something, it’s usually too late or near to closing time to make the trip worthwhile (which is what weekends are for now).

Regardless of the time I spend (or waste depending on how you look at it), I’m still enjoying it fully. There were more things about working in Maryland that I was going to discuss, but I’m saving them for later. I’ve already spent enough time writing this post as is.