Figures

Talking to A- and subsequently rereading a lot of what I've written on here over the years has made me realize I've gotten complacent with documenting my introspection. I realized I see some of the old stuff I wrote in new light even if I felt like I had a lot of clarity at the time of writing (after all, I had to have some clarity to articulate it in the first place). It's nice to look back on your thoughts once you're removed from the emotions and circumstances that evoked them.

I want to get back into the habit of writing on here. Tonight is not the night to start up again, and to be honest I don't know if I can guarantee consistency and regularity, but I will try.

Since it's the middle of finals, I don't have time to write at length, so I will instead just leave this here. It's a poem I wrote dedicated to my mom that I performed at SWC's (un)filtered, an event with the central theme of gender and sexual violence. I'm still looking for the courage and the method to share it with my mom. (Thanks G- for your support in making this happen)

Figures

Hey there, little boy
I’m worried about you.
I’m worried about you because you have big dreams
Big, like the airplanes you see in the sky,
That someday, you hope to build and to fly
Big, like the bank account you want to have
Six figures a year to buy glamour and pizzazz
But wait
There’s another figure I know you want
A woman’s body, to have and to flaunt
A body with which to make a child
  Or maybe two, at the same time.
A child you can then lift on your broad shoulders
Because I know, little boy, you dream of getting big muscles

Well you’ve made it Daddy.
Those dreams have come true.

But the thing about big dreams is that you forget about the little things
Because you’ve got your head so high in the clouds that it clouds your judgment.

Look Dad,
Can’t you see? Your sea of money
Can’t drown the sound of beer bottles falling by Mom’s bed
Can’t wash away the memory of my twin sister sobbing in my head
And it sure as hell won’t wash away the red
  From your hands or your face
The red of the lipstick that marks your disgrace
So stop trying to buy our favor

And you call yourself a father figure.
Go figure.

Because have you considered
That while you’re out there chasing your dreams
Mom’s at home chasing drink after drink
Have you considered
That while you’re out there pursuing womanly perfection,
Looking for the some action to tame your erection
Because you’ve lost all attraction to my mother
My mother who has never stopped showing you affection,
My mother who’s committed no infraction to deserve your rejection
Because her only flaw is the scar she got when she gave birth to your twin son and daughter by c-section.
Have you considered
That there’s much more to a woman than her bodily complexion?

If you don’t think people can love people who are flawed
What makes you think you deserve to be loved at all?

Almost ready to launch public blog!

In lieu of a blog post here this month, I've been taking a lot of time writing and refining the first blog post of my soon-to-be public blog. You can check it out here!

Hopefully, I will be able to find a good cadence where I find time to do personal blogging as well as public blogging, but unfortunately that didn't happen this month.

Have a lot to write about, but haven't had much time

I haven't been able to do due diligence towards my blog in recent months, and I apologize (to myself and to anyone who reads this) for that. There's a lot I've wanted to write about, but haven't found time to do so.

I've been deeply mired in a lot of emotionally draining circumstances in the past few months, and I'd be lying if I said that things are going splendidly. My mom found (another?) tumor in her neck, though it's still benign. Meanwhile, in my dorm, the escalation of some tension has culminated in some hate crime against me again, and far more clear in intent than just some chewed up gum on my door handle.

One of the works of art on my door

I love me some good whiteboard vandalism.

Fortunately, a lot of the people I am close to have lent me a lot of emotional strength, whether they know it or not, either by directly being there for me or by being an inspiration because their experiences I use as a blueprint for resiliency and growth. This past weekend at SBS spring retreat alone, I've witnessed the human spirit wrestling with weight much heavier than that which I bear, and that allows me to continue forward. It allows me to fight hate not also with hate but with love:

Take that.

In reflecting on this recent stuff, I am reminded of something I learned in CS 124 last quarter during the unit on sentiment analysis. When it comes to affected experiences, they can actually be classified in one of five ways called Scherer's Typology of Affective States:

• Emotion: relatively brief episode of synchronized response to the evaluation of an external or internal event as being of major significance (e.g. angry, sad, joyful, fearful, ashamed, proud, elated, desperate)
• Mood: diffuse affect state, most pronounced as change in subjective feeling, of low intensity but relatively long duration, often without apparent cause (e.g. cheerful, gloomy, irritable, listless, depressed, buoyant)
• Interpersonal stances: affective stance taken towards another person in a specific interaction, coloring the interpersonal exchange in that situation (e.g. distant, cold, warm, supportive, contemptuous)
• Attitudes: relatively enduring, affectively colored beliefs, preferences, and predispositions towards objects or persons (e.g. liking, loving, hating, valuing, desiring)
• Personality traits: emotionally laden, stable personality dispositions and behavior tendencies (e.g. nervous, anxious, reckless, morose, hostile, envious, jealous)

I think the recent months have consisted of a lot of negative emotion, but my mood has stayed afloat through a few experiences that have assured me that the negative things are merely episodic, and that even in the midst of such episodes there are people who are there to catch me. That can't be said for everyone, and I'm lucky because it's a very, very good place to be.

Additionally, I have been doing a lot of thinking catalyzed by my psychiatry class. It's on Modern Relationships from a Couples and Family Therapy Perspective, and it's incredibly eye opening. Between that class, conversations I've had with N- and E-, and SBS spring retreat, I've had a lot to think about. Expect stuff on (aka note to self:) negativity threshold and the relationship tension escape velocity, equilibriation and re-equilibriation, relationship resonance, first-order and second-order change, n-dimensional behavioral cones, regret vs. guilt, dynamic vs. static conversations, and what drives my decision-making on personal matters to come.

Quick couple of thoughts

Really busy this month so not much time to do a thorough update, but just a couple of things:

1) I'm realizing there's a lot of small things that can make me inordinately happy if I learn to recognize them. I was at Starbucks one Monday morning trying to get a coffee, and the cash register froze just as I made my order. I was waiting there for like 40 seconds (i.e. not much time at all), and the cashier apologized for making me wait and told me the coffee was on them. I was happy about this for like two weeks following. This is the first time after starting to read Search Inside Yourself by Chade Meng-Tan that I actually felt that yes, mindfulness exercises do work. I definitely am buying into it more now, and want to work on that.

2) I realized I never want to work at a place that I'm not proud enough to own working for. This might seem obvious, but it never seemed more obvious than when I was at a startup career fair held by the CDC. There were two tables in particular that made me particularly grateful of where I am career-wise and the privilege I have in not having certain pragmatic concerns be as pressing (e.g. income).

The first was a conversation with a guy from a company that sells gifts for men, and they are shipped in this wooden box with a pathetic mini crowbar. I found myself standing in this crowded space with a lot of, as far as I can tell, code zombies/monkeys with this guy shaking a small crowbar at me telling me how awesome his company, which as far as I can tell is full of men that subscribe to some stereotype of certain gender roles, and I just thought to myself "I am so happy that I am not you."

The second was a conversation from a different guy whose elevator pitch had this hook: "Do you want to win $1000? Come play in our Angry Birds competition!" This was already a pretty big red flag for me, but I heard him out, and my gut reaction was right. His career fair giveaway was two wristbands to an open bar in Palo Alto, and I found myself so relieved that I feel like my passions and personal sense of identity are captivating enough that I don't need to use the possibility of winning money or the promise of alcohol/other material goods to fascinate the people around me.

These two conversations made me realize how hollow and empty I'd feel working somewhere I didn't enjoy. If short, 5-minute conversations could seem like they were sucking the life out of me, imagine what 40-hour workweeks would feel like. Blech. I promptly left the startup career fair. (I felt much more at home at the social impact career fair the following day, although even there some of the companies present just felt greasy and fake.)

3) I'm doing this thing where I try to watch a TED talk every other day, amounting to 3 TED talks or so a week. This can be while I'm waiting in lines, between classes, in the restroom, whatever (this whole smartphone thing is pretty neat). I realized that in the process of working towards my degree within the infrastructure of formal education, I've lost sight of the joy of learning for the sake of learning. I rarely do leisure reading any more. I'm determined to change that, and TED talks are conveniently digestible, free, and interesting. I definitely feel like watching more of these talks makes me the 21st century equivalent of "well-read" in that I am more open-minded, keeping up with developments in fields that I care about, and generally becoming a more intellectually interesting person.

First New Year's Resolution ever, 1 month in.

I'm not a big fan of New Year's resolutions. I feel like if at any point I find something I want to change about myself, I don't want to wait until New Year's to make it happen. As such, I haven't made many New Year's resolutions to date.

However, I did make one resolution this year.

Resolution 2015: Get my shit together.

Quality resolution, isn't it?

My goal by the end of college was to figure out what I want to do with my life (career-wise, personal life, etc.). I didn't expect to have made progress towards whatever that ends up looking like, but I at least wanted to know what direction I was going in.

I realized just before winter break that I'm lucky enough to be in a place where I have a strong sense of purpose in my life, and that's something many people of my age cannot say for themselves. In particular, I want to spend my life making people happy and improving their quality of life, but in a very surefire way. I don't mean some wishy-washy social committee-type thing. I mean scientifically rigorously looking at ways that people can attain greater fulfillment and satisfaction. I want to engineer happiness.

Even though that's still very big picture and doesn't offer much granularity, it serves as a pretty good guide for my decision-making. In fact, in the long run, it is much better to have this top piece (the why) and be able to go top-down in figuring out what I want to do rather than having a sense of what I like to do/am good at/am competent at without knowing why I continue to do it.

So why do I feel like I'm stuck and moving so slowly? Why do I feel like I'm wasting a lot of time? Why do I not feel like I have my shit together?

I spent winter break trying to figure out why this is, and I identified a couple of general things I need to do.

1) Know when to fold.

I am incredibly susceptible to the sunk cost fallacy. I place weight on past effort expended or invested in a particular activity, class, or person, but that's a naive basis to make future decisions. I get deeply attached to a lot of things. In C-'s words: just like a poker player doesn't expect to win every hand and instead must choose to commit to hands wisely, so must we be cognizant of when certain decisions didn't play out like anticipated and be willing to cut losses and prepare for other decisions we make going forward.

More concretely, this has led me to readily drop classes I attended for two and a half weeks before realizing it's not for me. I've started putting distance between me and the Stanford Robotics Club because it simply wasn't making me happy, despite what I've dedicated to founding the club and keeping it running smoothly. I've stopped watching TV shows that I no longer enoyed in later seasons. I've stopped investing time in people I don't believe care about me in the same way. I've halted job interview processes when it becomes clear that I don't want to work there, even if I was never rejected as a candidate.

This doesn't mean truths in the past were any less true. I am not any less authentic because what motivates me now differs from what once did. The past can (and should) still shape me. Past values matter insofar as how they inform or influence my current beliefs and values.

2) Commit wholeheartedly when you commit.

This is sort of the opposite of knowing when to fold. For the vast majority of choices I make, I will not have absolute certainty about at the time that I make the decision nor ever. If I wanted to wait until I had certainty on anything, I'd be completely paralyzed. Waiting for certainty is precisely that: a wait. It's passive, and relinquishes control to forces beyond our control.

That complacency leads to inaction and general sluggishness. When you have an array of good choices in front of you, and you (and the people who know and care about you) cannot determine which is the correct or best choice, chances are there isn't a best choice. Have some confidence that you'd be able to identify an obvious best choice. Instead, it's all about picking one and making it great.

(Caveat: in poker, bets are rarely just a matter of going all-in and not at all. Similarly, committing wholeheartedly doesn't necessarily mean rule everything else out, but it does mean taking ownership of whatever extent of commitment you make in any given distribution of commitment of resources. I feel like blogging has that effect for me, where by having them written down somewhere it gives my thoughts much more substance, and helps me commit and take ownership of change I want to see in myself.)

3) Do not let myself slip into negative self-fulfilling prophecies and exacerbation cycles.

Over break I noticed that 1/13 marked the day that I've been out of my relationship with E- longer than I had been in it (barring some technicalities in counting). I think I've figured out what was holding me back from moving on: I have this flawed model of how what is meaningful or important to me is allowed to change over time. If you imagine a graph of time vs. importance, I've only allowed myself to say that how important any given thing is always monotonically increasing or decreasing.

This model is problematic in three ways. One, it assumes my assessment is perfect, which it is not. It doesn't not allow me the opportunity to revise first impressions once they're on track to be monotonically increasing or decreasing. Secondly, my assessment has nothing to do with a reciprocal such assessment, and reciprocity (as my own psychology research has shown, hah.) plays a huge role in determining socializing or altruistic behavior. Thirdly, it means that anything that grows in importance to me can never be less important ever. In particular, this third piece has left me feeling suffocated by guilt, unable to accept that someone I have cared for deeply in the past can acceptably be cared for less, and unable to bear the pain of being less important than I once was to someone.

Borrowing from romcoms, I've realized why it is so important to commit wholeheartedly to something. Romcom protagonists often seem absurd because they go to ridiculous lengths in their unconditional love. Sure, it's not a guarantee that all of your wholehearted commitments will pay off the way every single romcom protagonists' seem to. But the reality is that you cannot have those romcom moments if you don't try. If you fail, then you are just someone whose grandiose whathaveyou did not bear fruit, as everyone would expect; if you succeed, then you do become the stuff of legends/Hollywood. Seems like a reasonably good risk-reward to take to me.

Aside: To some extent, being able to take that stance comes from a place of privilege in more ways than one. I can't deny that. I was raised by a mother who has left me with a secure enough (though not 100% secure) attachment style that I can withstand potential emotional setbacks if putting myself out there and making myself vulnerable leads to hurt. I happen to have skill sets that employers are willing to pay good money for, and that gives me the financial means to be fairly liberal in the capacity in which I commit to things wholeheartedly. It is a privilege I have, and, equal or not across everyone, I should use this to the best of my ability.

Romcom protagonists--at least in their moments of emotional triumph, anyway--tend to have very short-term memory for the setbacks they encounter while maintaining saliency in memories of elation or happiness. For the same magnitude of positive and negative emotions, the positive emotions always last much longer while negative emotions become transformative forces from which they draw strength and courage and spunk. This kind of mindset keeps them optimistic and protects them from negative self-fulfilling prophecies. The best way to make your life a real romcom, it seems, is to believe and live as if it already is. If you feel like the world is falling apart around you, just think to yourself that romcoms virtually all have happy endings, so you can't be at the end. Keep looking for the next thread of storyline to chase.

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What am I trying to do more to be consistent with those 3 things above, aka getting my shit together?

1. Read more, especially stuff that makes me think. The more thoughtfully I can think about my own actions and the people and world around me, the better I can fold or commit appropriately.
2. Be open about myself. I've been trying to make myself vulnerable to people again, mainly in the form of demonstrating how much I care about them even if I feel silly or uneasy or unsure how they'll receive my expression. In professional contexts, I've made a personal website that attempts to inject my character and personality into what otherwise would be just a distilled professional profile (i.e. resume) (I say "attempts" because it's a work in progress, and would love to hear your thoughts on the website).
3. Disregarding norms or rules when I see fit. I've always trusted my judgment, but I've often acted against my best judgment to be consistent with norms or rules. I've been trying to be very clear to myself what it is that I actually want, as opposed to stuff I want to want only because there is some level of external social, financial, or whatever prestige associated with getting that.
4a. Stand up for myself. Give myself space and alone time when I need it. Act on what is important to me, rather than what will maintain peace and harmony among the people around me. Be able to recognize when I have every right to believe that I am right.
4b. Be humble. Confidence and self-assurance is good, but over-confidence is not. Being mindful of when what I have once stood up for is flawed, and graciously and openmindedly reconciling the differences when appropriate.

Thoughts on Performing and Value (What We Want)

I've been thinking a lot about performing after taking Liquid Flow, doing Gaieties, and going to Spoken Word shows. In the Liquid Flow, the instructor emphasized heavily how we should "dance through life" starting from the first day. At first, I had an eyeroll reaction to that sentiment because of how cliche'd it was. However, it became rather clear that her idea of what dance entails is far broader than what I had previously associated with the word dance.

To me, dancing meant intentional physical movement for the purpose of exhibition. It's what people do on on stages when you go see a dance show. To dance through life, then, would be to constantly be putting on an exhibition for people, and that sounds absolutely exhausting. It sounds exhausting and scary because, like all live entertainment (from dance to music to figure skating and ski jumps and whatnot), your final delivery is under complete scrutiny of the audience, and in that final delivery, and all of your hard work could pay off or all go to waste in the blink of an eye. In fact, when I found out that N- and K- were ESFPs, often called "The Performers," I felt a combination of pity and utmost respect that they lived for that kind of pressure.

Okay sure. Maybe the way I've engaged in performing arts in the years leading up to college, that's been the case. Between grade school orchestra classes and private cello or piano competitions, that has been precisely the nature of the performances I've been a part of. I've been assigned grades or scores or the like. There's been winners and losers, first stands and second stands and then everyone else.

It's funny how nicely that analogizes to how many people think about value, where value is defined as what they want. For both value and performance, we construct some system to quantify it that is misaligned with how we should think about them.

For value, we've constructed the system of currency. We quantify value in these monetary ways, and we are encultured to associate economic value with what we want when in fact, what we want is happiness and fulfillment. That's not to say that we should be naive and think that you can be supremely happy having no economic wealth; on the contrary, you'd probably starve to death. But it is to say that, past some threshold, that system falls apart. There is plenty of research that shows that happiness does not continue to grow with income past some threshold. I'd say this actually is consistent across all layers of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs in that, once you're x% satisfied with your security at a particular level, you get diminishing returns in subjective well-being within that category.

I think what's hard to grasp is that layers in Maslow's Hierarchy can actually be contradictory to each other. An obvious example is charity. Charity is often consistent with morality (self-actualization needs) and leads to getting respect by others (esteem needs), yet is inherently detrimental to security of resources (safety needs). You're spending money on something else, how could you!

The problem is that we are taught to address (and, at a neurobiological level, can only comprehend or grapple with) the needs in the bottom-up order in Maslow's Hierarchy. By the time we have the cognitive functions to do abstract thinking (starts at 11-12 years old or so, and finishes developing at 25 or so), we're already so ingrained into thinking about the world with preference on a particular layer. By the time I am old enough to think about my esteem and self-actualization needs, I probably have been taught for 20 years to strive for a high-paying job. If I get a $60000/yr job, aim for an $80000/yr promotion. If I get that, then go for the $100000. At no point am I helped to the realization that continuing to pursue my safety needs are going to get me diminishing returns, and actually inhibit me meeting my higher needs! True value is not actually zero-sum, whereas the metric of economic value is! When you help out at a food kitchen, you could be satisfying your esteem and self-actualization needs while satisfying someone else's physiological needs, for instance.

For performances, we've similarly constructed the system of objective assessment, or at least that's how I had been taught to think about performance. When there are winners and losers, performance becomes just as zero-sum, and the currency is the mechanics or technical prowess. I hated that. I quit cello because I was so frustrated by my orchestra class. In fact, I did this against the advice I was given by counselors and my parents: one of the oft-cited reasons for doing music through middle school and high school seems to be that it helps get into college. How dry is that? It totally sucks away all of the best parts of performance.

Through Liquid Flow, pretty much any way in which we moved our bodies with conviction the instructor considered dance. On the day of our final performance, she gave us all a pep talk before we began the show, and she told us that she loves to perform because it is one of the selfless things. It is not selfish, like trying to make more money, or being the center of attention. To her, it involved inspiring the audience, and whether that was an actual formal audience at a show or a classroom of ragtag students from various walks of their student careers just trying to dabble in dance it didn't matter.

I didn't get it at the time, but I think I finally know what she means. Dance, and performance in general, is an invitation. It is something you extend to an audience, and they can choose to accept or ignore. If they accept, you as a performer and them as the audience form a team in an effort to create an extraordinary experience. As a performer, it's all about what you can do for the audience, how to touch their lives for those short minutes (or hours if you're lucky), and how you can move them emotionally or physically or spiritually.

When it comes to formal shows, the actual "performance" mindset starts well before the actual show; it involves countless hours carefully crafting an experience with the audience in mind, much of which goes unnoticed, culminating in one short-lived but spectacular exhibition. No need to worry about how technically sound your performance is; for them to show up to the show, they've already accepted your invitation, and they're there to help. Case in point: the snapping at Spoken Word when people forget their lines.

To dance through life, therefore, is to constantly live and behave openly in a way where the invitation  to create something that defies zero-sumness is always there for someone to take. I think that's exactly how people like N-, K-, people in SBS, Spoken Word, and many people in Gaieties regard performance, whether consciously or not. And when that's what performance is, I love it. I always want to be extending that invitation, and I always want to be around people who will extend that invitation to me, and when I am I always want to accept it.

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Just a housekeeping note. I might have to get surgery in my eye. There's something wrong with the meibomian glands in my right eye that led to the eye infection from a few months ago and the inflammation from late last winter/early spring quarter.

Thanksgiving

I haven't had a chance to do much introspection recently between classes, SBS, RAing, and Gaieties, so a more comprehensive post will probably come after finals are over.

With that said, I have thanks to give!

I am thankful for my friends. For this past quarter, I've felt like I'm in my own world. I don't have the people who I feel closest to and who know me the best around me on a day-to-day basis the way I've had in the past, so I've been more alone than I would like. But despite this aloneness, I don't feel too lonely. There are people to catch me if I fall. I hope they also know that I am here to catch them as well, even if I'm not physically around them.

I am thankful for my family. I'm not in the business of convincing myself that my family is perfect, but in spite of all of the strife and all of the rifts between my family, I have people in my life who value (in some way, anyway) my being part of their family. If nothing else, it means there are always people from whom I can learn and grow from, even if I don't feel like I'll ever become emotionally close with them. And of course, my mom has been among my biggest supporters since forever ago, even from hundreds of miles away.

I am thankful for my health. Many of the goals I have would be unattainable or much more difficult if I weren't as physically healthy. Sure, I'm not the pinnacle of good health. Between eye infections and fevers and just the common colds, there are days, maybe a few weeks at worse, that just downright suck. But I'm lucky that the word I had to use there was "days" and not something longer.

I am thankful for the countless of unsung individuals in my life who I take for granted. There are a lot of nameless faces who somehow improve my life, from custodial and kitchen staff in the dorms and dining halls, to the emergency medical personnel I've been able to rely on during on-call crises, to the classmates in section who reached to help me pick up a pen I dropped without hesitation. It turns out there are a lot of people who want the best for you, just in very little, less visible ways. I need to remember that when I'm going through personal struggles.

I am thankful for coming out of difficult times still with the capacity for love and trust and optimism. I don't think I'm wearing rose-colored glasses the same way I was in the past in that I don't try to coerce my perception of any given moment into something splendid. However, I am comfortable facing the reality that things might not be going well and still believe that they can and will get better, particularly if I do something about it. That's something I hope I don't ever lose, because I've seen what not having that looks like. There are people I know personally who, in the aftermath of particularly frustrating or upsetting experiences, adopt a mindset characterized by insatiable cynicism and general jadedness. It's downright paralyzing, and not how I want to live.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!