The Return

Every time I return to Shanghai, I am filled with a mix of emotions—some good, some bad. I am happy to be able to spend time with my parents and I am happy that they are happy to see me. I enjoy the fact that I am on summer vacation and can actually relax and not worry about academics. I look forward to being able to lose some weight by being more active. I am not looking forward to the heat and humidity. I detest the way most of the Chinese people in Shanghai act. However, when it comes to seeing former schoolmates, I don’t really know how to feel. There are only a few of them that I would still consider as good friends to this day and actually mean it. But for most everyone else, I just don’t know how to feel. I don’t really know how to express these confused emotions because well, they are confusing.

Who are these people to me? Who am I to them? It’s funny because I have kept all the notes, cards, letters, and yearbook comments that people have given me because it felt genuine at the time—“Keep in touch” this, “I’ll think of you all the time” that. Looking back on all of them, I’ve come to the conclusion that it was all a load of crap regardless of how colorful or smiley face laden they were. Well, it probably wasn’t all crap to begin with and those people may have truly meant it, but they do expire and then turn into crap. From my experiences, friendships have an expiration date of about two years at the most after being separated. The ironic part is that it is primarily due to a lack of communication even though communicating these days is ridiculously easy. It is as easy as replying an email, an instant message, a text, a phone call, a Facebook message, etc

Trying to initiate the bridge of communication all the time is very tiring—but it is worth it when people reply. However, most of the time there is no reply or there is the standard reply of “sorry, I’m busy right now.” I find it amazing how some people can be so busy and swamped with school and work to reply an email yet still have the time to go out clubbing or hiking through the woods or swimming in the ocean. Am I bitter about all this? Sure I am—who wouldn’t be? I’m not going to try to shut those people out of my life though. I am simply just too tired of trying to initiate the efforts of keeping in touch when there is no response. “Don’t burn your bridges” is a common idiom and is definitely sound advice so I won’t—even though there really isn’t much to burn anyway.

I guess these experiences from former Shanghai schoolmates have really affected my outlook on people and friendships. I don’t put as much effort into being a good friend with most people anymore—I only try with those that have the best chances of actually lasting. Every time someone stops talking to me for no apparent reason, I often find myself questioning where and how I went wrong as a friend. Was I even their friend to begin with? I guess I will never know.

One

Every moment of our life, we are faced with decisions. What to wear, what music to listen to, what notes to take in class, what to eat, who to eat with, where to eat, when to eat (no, I am not hungry right now), etc. Some decisions are larger than others such as where to go for college, what to major in, what career path to follow so on and so forth. Deep down inside everyone, I'm sure that there was one point where we all asked ourselves, "what if?" about a certain choice we didn't choose.

I definitely always run alternate scenarios through my head over and over again about not just decisions that I made or didn't make, but also events happening that were out of my control that would most commonly be regarded to as randomly generated events such as being stuck in traffic, waking up late, being in a natural catastrophe, stubbing your toe, getting an extra chicken nugget, etc.

As I was browsing through Netflix for a movie or tv series to watch, I came across Jet Li's The One. The whole premise of the movie was that there were alternate realities that existed at the same time in a multiverse. One small bit that has always grabbed my attention was that in one reality, Al Gore was the president while George W. Bush was the president in another reality. Given the background of the 2000 elections, the two candidates were very even in votes.

This prompted me to think about how things are in other universes that may be different based simply on a different decision that I've made. What if I decided to do engineering instead of architecture? What if I decided to stay at SMIC to finish high school instead of return back to Washington? What if I never decided to not date during high school? How would things have been different than what they are now?

I am quite curious as to how I would be different had I made different choices. I would like to visit these alternate universes just to observe. I guess it would be kind of like a 'choose your own adventure' book where we can just simply run through all the different possibilities not to pick the best one, but to see what could have been.

Summer

It is now summer and things are looking to be pretty peachy.

The past semester for me has been quite tiring. I did not get a lot of sleep and was often times lacking in motivation. I did have a decent social life though and made some decent new friends. Definitely a lot more friends than when I was at Shoreline for the two years before Georgia Tech. I ended the semester with a lot of uncertainty in terms of my grades. And at Tech, the difference between an 89.9 and a 90 (79.9 and 80 etc) is one whole GPA point...there's nothing in between. For the most part, all my grades were hovering around those marks. I had a very high B in Studio, which was very, very disappointing. I had a low A in Chinese, a low B in History of Architecture, and a solid A in CS. My Chinese and History finals were extremely hard and I did not know if the A I got on my final exercise in studio was high enough to pull me into the A zone. The only class that I knew what I was going to get was CS--which thankfully was an A.

I left campus with an uncertainty and really didn't know what to expect. Fortunately, I managed to pull out all As and one B, a 3.76--what I was hoping to get. This usually never happens because before, I would usually get the lower end of what was possible for me to get. It would have been much less surprising had I gotten one A, two Bs, and a C--a 3.0. I was very satisfied with my grades this semester because I have never actually done this well before for an entire semester. I would like to keep up with this consistency too. I hope this will be able to serve as some sort of motivation for the semesters in the future.

I have also been fortunate enough to be able to get a summer internship at an architecture firm in Shanghai. This also allows me to register for summer credit because this internship relates to my major. I will be getting 12 class credits since I will be interning full time--and I get paid!. Of course, I'll most likely be paid very little being in China and all, but some is still better than none. In addition to all this, I am starting to pick up some steam with my photography as well. Over the past semester, I have managed to make over $100 in selling prints as well as earned over $200 for shooting an event. Hopefully I will be able to build upon this and start to earn a little bit of income to help fund for my photography hobby as well as to just help out with some extra cash.

Things are finally starting to turn around for me I think. The past few years have been very hard and I am very glad that it seems like I have weathered the long storm and made it out on top. However, I am still very cautious...I've seen 'The Perfect Storm'...