The first time I ever caught a fly was in Carpenteria, California. My hometown, Thousand Oaks, California, lies halfway between downtown Los Angeles to the southeast and Santa Barbara to the slight northwest without about forty miles to each destination. Carpenteria is just a bit before Santa Barbara and sits as one of those prototypical California beach cities.
My hometown is not a beach city. It’s about seven to twelve miles inland with the closest passage to the sea in the western end of Malibu. Carpenteria, as my description would imply, sits on the coast, and with a small population and great weather, it’s one of my favorite getaway destinations (though I haven’t been there in quite awhile).
Compared to the big cities of California (I count four or five), the pace of life is quite slower—in a good way. Instead of having to fight for a parking spot (or in better-planned areas drive through seas of parking lots), it’s not difficult to find somewhere to park close to where you’re meant to be.
Even walking on the streets, the speed of ambulating that I had grown up with in my suburb was noticeably faster than in Carpenteria. Before I realized this, I would nearly run into people before learning to just slow down. Later we would find a conspicuous magazine in a convenience store on how to grow marijuana most efficiently, but that’s beyond the point and a different story entirely that did not involve any illegal activities.
Though I enjoy slowing down, because, hey, who doesn't, I can most definitely live a fast-paced life. In high school I would go off of five-and-a-half to six hours of sleep a night and frequent fifteen-hour days to get everything done that I had to do.
Hong Kong itself is known for having such a lifestyle. It’s funny though that they may be busy in work, life and what have you, they are some of the weirdest walkers. I’ve always believed there was a correlation between how busy you were at any given period of time and how fast you walk, but I’ve been finding reasons since day two to revise that theory.
First off, I’ve been stuck behind many a slow businessman (as indicated by his or her suit) and many more pairs of people who do not allot any room on either side to pass.
In general, people walk funny here. People think that I dwell on what’s not important, but in reality, I’m spiting back what everyone already knows. Back in the United States, most all crowded places I’ve been to have followed the pattern of walking on the right. It works as well for cars at it does for people to just have one side of the road or path, respectively, and stick to it. It just makes traffic flow better, and in the case of cars especially, it makes everything safer.
So of course, I followed suite. Seeing everyone walking on the right and walking past each other on the right makes you do so yourself, so I thought something similar might apply for Hong Kong. Here, traffic moves on the left as established by the British, so I thought people might walk on the left, just as common courtesy.
I know something as small as common courtesy is highly variable among regions, so when people didn’t really prefer to walk on one side or the other, at first it was irksome, but then I just learned to accept it. I now walk past everyone on the right, just like back home—and it doesn’t cause any more chaos than there already is during busy passing period at HKU or crowded tubes in the MTR.
What is irksome though, is that there seems to be missing any sort of courtesy when on narrow stairways or narrow paths in general. Back home, if you walk side-by-side with someone on a path that fits only two people abreast and someone is approaching from the other direction, you go single file so that the other person can get by without an issue.
Here though, I’ve walked down many a stairway where the people going the opposite direction do not bother to make room for you to pass by on either side, in which case, since I can’t just disappear, I just stand. I don’t know what else I could do honestly. As I found out at the beginning of high school, I’m skinnier walking straight forward than turning to the side when I have my backpack on my shoulders.
One of two things would happen. The first is that the person about to walk into me attempts to file towards the other side. The other is that this merging is only partially successful, in which case I get knocked on the shoulder for not making room that I really could not make.
Just another item in the sub-surface iceberg.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
Showing posts with label driving. Show all posts
Showing posts with label driving. Show all posts
Monday, November 16, 2009
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Beijing: Culture in a Land without Speech
I’d like to start by saying that I love Hong Kong. It’s become something of a home to me though I’ve only been here for a few months, and as I’ve explained, as much as I’d like to extend into to next semester, I just can’t. Yes, I’ve said my fair share of bad things about Hong Kong, but in my defense, I feel I’ve said some good things as well, and I voiced my criticisms in a respective way with reasons stated. So as a basis for comments voiced thus far on a particular blog post, I still have no regrets in coming to Hong Kong over many other choices of places to study.
In less crude terms, I’ve described many aspects of Hong Kong to be quite hollow. Hong Kong’s culture seems to be the lack of, and in a sense, the business and international finance aspect of Hong Kong is really the culture in and of itself. In many ways I’ve seen an identity problem here, as people acknowledge their British past before claiming to be part of the People’s Republic of China, even in the purely state sense.
So over reading week, I traveled to a city that seems more than proud to call itself Chinese. I’d been there before two years ago, but now, I got to see the nation’s capital in a new light, from a new perspective, having studying in Hong Kong for a while now, seeing how the locals view China and how they view their position in the world.
Probably a month ago now, we had Margaret Ng, a politician, as a guest speaker in my Hong Kong and the World class. At one point, she broke out to explicitly address the local students. “You are not any more special than Mainland Chinese students. Nothing about you having grown up here in Hong Kong makes you superior to students coming out of China.” She went on to say that they were smart and skilled, hinting at their English skills even being better than Hong Kong students. (No surprise there.)
On another note, in California (and probably in the United States), we value highly well roundedness in studies and a balance in life between work and fun. Likewise, majoring in music causes no overt criticism in saying that a major in neuroscience is just better. In the States, it’s about money, but it’s also about interest for most. “Do what you love,” everyone likes to say.
Do I think most Hong Kong students love business and finance? No. Could I be wrong, not likely, but at the same time very much so. Students here seem to lack interest in the arts or life as an academic and it seems like the few that don’t lack find better more conducive environments to their interests outside of Hong Kong.
In my Hong Kong and the World class again, they mention that businesses seeking to enter Asia, and especially China, go through Hong Kong because of the rule of law and free flow of information (which we would call freedom of speech back home). It seems though that for a people that have free speech, they don’t use it. In no way does that mean it should be taken away, but the fact that there is little visible political activism here (I’ve personally only heard whispers), while possibly a cultural thing, means that people here take a lot for granted and expect their business environment to stay open without much maintenance in that arena.
And I find myself more often an observer than an activist, but I think this lack of well-rounded interest, should it not change, may lead to the fall of Hong Kong. And of course it may not, and if I’m wrong, the more power to them. But thinking about their freedom of speech makes you think about places that don’t have it to the full extent that we do in the United States or in Hong Kong.
Take China, where I went to, where the Internet is censored and Tiananmen Square is supposedly monitored for unrest by PLA soldiers dressed as civilians. My friend, in searching for a particular bar in the hotel room, was blocked by the government and he lost Internet privileges to access Google for at least fifteen minutes as punishment.
Beijing just clicked as a city that’s on the right track to something. Yeah, the people spit (indoors too, sometimes) and horns honk as traffic breaks ranks, but the thing is that there’s more to Beijing than just business, or anything else for that manner. I’ve always heard that Beijing is China’s political center and Shanghai its economic, but the thing is that there’s so much more going on that just politics in Beijing.
There are sports and arts highly expressed around the city. Music blasts out of some shops, and Mandarin-language music in much higher quantity than just American music. In Hong Kong, the only places with music open at night and serve mostly tourists and expats looking for a good time. Street food so prominent around Beijing (though ultimately a way to make money) serves to ground the city and give it character, whereas in Hong Kong, non-locals struggle to find good street food, which is noticeably less common here than elsewhere as many people have moved onto restaurants and such.
It seems that to me, as well as my friends, all the little things that made the place more human and less business affected the environment. Beijing just turned into something that I wanted to keep exploring and keep experiencing.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
In less crude terms, I’ve described many aspects of Hong Kong to be quite hollow. Hong Kong’s culture seems to be the lack of, and in a sense, the business and international finance aspect of Hong Kong is really the culture in and of itself. In many ways I’ve seen an identity problem here, as people acknowledge their British past before claiming to be part of the People’s Republic of China, even in the purely state sense.
So over reading week, I traveled to a city that seems more than proud to call itself Chinese. I’d been there before two years ago, but now, I got to see the nation’s capital in a new light, from a new perspective, having studying in Hong Kong for a while now, seeing how the locals view China and how they view their position in the world.
Probably a month ago now, we had Margaret Ng, a politician, as a guest speaker in my Hong Kong and the World class. At one point, she broke out to explicitly address the local students. “You are not any more special than Mainland Chinese students. Nothing about you having grown up here in Hong Kong makes you superior to students coming out of China.” She went on to say that they were smart and skilled, hinting at their English skills even being better than Hong Kong students. (No surprise there.)
On another note, in California (and probably in the United States), we value highly well roundedness in studies and a balance in life between work and fun. Likewise, majoring in music causes no overt criticism in saying that a major in neuroscience is just better. In the States, it’s about money, but it’s also about interest for most. “Do what you love,” everyone likes to say.
Do I think most Hong Kong students love business and finance? No. Could I be wrong, not likely, but at the same time very much so. Students here seem to lack interest in the arts or life as an academic and it seems like the few that don’t lack find better more conducive environments to their interests outside of Hong Kong.
In my Hong Kong and the World class again, they mention that businesses seeking to enter Asia, and especially China, go through Hong Kong because of the rule of law and free flow of information (which we would call freedom of speech back home). It seems though that for a people that have free speech, they don’t use it. In no way does that mean it should be taken away, but the fact that there is little visible political activism here (I’ve personally only heard whispers), while possibly a cultural thing, means that people here take a lot for granted and expect their business environment to stay open without much maintenance in that arena.
And I find myself more often an observer than an activist, but I think this lack of well-rounded interest, should it not change, may lead to the fall of Hong Kong. And of course it may not, and if I’m wrong, the more power to them. But thinking about their freedom of speech makes you think about places that don’t have it to the full extent that we do in the United States or in Hong Kong.
Take China, where I went to, where the Internet is censored and Tiananmen Square is supposedly monitored for unrest by PLA soldiers dressed as civilians. My friend, in searching for a particular bar in the hotel room, was blocked by the government and he lost Internet privileges to access Google for at least fifteen minutes as punishment.
Beijing just clicked as a city that’s on the right track to something. Yeah, the people spit (indoors too, sometimes) and horns honk as traffic breaks ranks, but the thing is that there’s more to Beijing than just business, or anything else for that manner. I’ve always heard that Beijing is China’s political center and Shanghai its economic, but the thing is that there’s so much more going on that just politics in Beijing.
There are sports and arts highly expressed around the city. Music blasts out of some shops, and Mandarin-language music in much higher quantity than just American music. In Hong Kong, the only places with music open at night and serve mostly tourists and expats looking for a good time. Street food so prominent around Beijing (though ultimately a way to make money) serves to ground the city and give it character, whereas in Hong Kong, non-locals struggle to find good street food, which is noticeably less common here than elsewhere as many people have moved onto restaurants and such.
It seems that to me, as well as my friends, all the little things that made the place more human and less business affected the environment. Beijing just turned into something that I wanted to keep exploring and keep experiencing.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Some Notes Before I Go
Tomorrow, I leave for Hong Kong and the University of Hong Kong, where I will spend the next four months studying and sightseeing. I’ll leave for Los Angeles International Airport at 6 a.m. for my first leg to San Francisco. From there I have a thirteen-and-half hour flight direct to Hong Kong. I’m all packed but not necessarily ready to go.
I’m still nervous as ever as I anticipate my long journey and longer transition. But already I am confident that I will quickly make Hong Kong my home away from home. At UCSD I served as an American student to help orient international students and in the same manner, HKU has set me up with a Hong Kong student to help me, now the international student, find my way. While I’ll mosey my way to the university from the airport, she has graciously offered to show me the campus the day after.
I arrive on August 21 and have orientation the following Friday, August 28. Class begins on September 1. Maybe by then I’ll get used to British English orthography and the metric system. Surely by then I’ll have bought blankets and a pillow.
Next time, I’ll be writing from Hong Kong.
I’m still nervous as ever as I anticipate my long journey and longer transition. But already I am confident that I will quickly make Hong Kong my home away from home. At UCSD I served as an American student to help orient international students and in the same manner, HKU has set me up with a Hong Kong student to help me, now the international student, find my way. While I’ll mosey my way to the university from the airport, she has graciously offered to show me the campus the day after.
I arrive on August 21 and have orientation the following Friday, August 28. Class begins on September 1. Maybe by then I’ll get used to British English orthography and the metric system. Surely by then I’ll have bought blankets and a pillow.
Next time, I’ll be writing from Hong Kong.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Quality v. Quality
Somehow I wanted to insert this aspect of my college experience into this blog by making it relevant somehow. Here’s my shot. I have full confidence that I may express certain feelings without upsetting certain people, mostly because I am sure that most of those people are not reading my blog. Some will be glad to read this post and some might think I’m just being bitter. Please believe me when I say that I have no intention of either.
It goes back to when I was real, real little. I think it was my father who gave me an “I’m going to Harvard” rattle. Whether or not he was the giver is irrelevant. My father is one of those who “only wants the best” for me, he would say; and I do so believe in his intentions.
Entering middle school I was poised to get straight As, no doubt. In the big jump from sixth to seventh grade I guess I found myself at a crossroads. At the time it would have sounded silly to say this, and it sounds only a little less now that I’m 19, but I like (as in prefer) to think that that was the end of my formative years in a sense. From then, my opinions have changed; I grew a few feet (I think); I learned how to drive—but nothing unlike that in the course of one’s adult life. I was poised to get into Stanford and remained so until I was rejected in 2007, in December.
Was it stubborn optimism that turned (what I like to think was) misfortune into hope?
Needless to say, I didn’t get straight As in middle school, nor high school for that matter. On the bright side, I didn’t get any Cs (or lower), nor did my GPA ever dip below 3.6.
And here we get to the topic of today’s post. Yes, the two sides are both qualities. And I know I’m not alone in thinking that I have had to make some difficult decisions over the years between two (or more) perfectly and equally equitable situations. In my case, I was caught up by quantity due to my inability to make chose but a few of the many existing scenarios before me.
Was it a good decision on my part? My mother asserted to me, after it was all set and done, “You probably should have done less. I think you stretched yourself out too thin. You couldn’t concentrate on grades and now you aren’t going to be going to your top choice school.”
I replied, “I honestly wouldn’t have done anything different.” And true to my words, my mind didn’t and still doesn’t think anything different.
My seldom-existent inner romantic would say that the heart wants what the heart wants and the brain could not, at that time, overcome the wishes of the heart, for rationality was gone. The heart had become one with the brain and there was nothing to be done.
So in this post I plan to pose three major decisions of quality versus quality (with many minor ones) that I went through. You may disagree; you may agree. All I hope is that my logic shows in my actions, hopefully culminating in relevance to my upcoming study abroad experience.
My first was in middle school.
When I was approaching fifth grade, there was a decision of whether or not to go to middle school. State legislation had just promoted the sixth grade to middle school (junior high school) status. However, there was a large enough group of parents who wanted to keep their kids in elementary school for sixth grade that Westlake Hills Elementary School kept sixth grade.
Why not stay in elementary school for sixth grade? My parents, with my consent kept me at Westlake Hills for sixth grade.
A third of the way across the school district (and Thousand Oaks), a good friend of mine went to Meadows Elementary School. Their parents had voted to get rid of sixth grade entirely there. As such, my friend went to middle school one year before I did.
I got to middle school as a seventh grader in the fall of 2002. My good friend and I were still pretty chummy and I ate lunch with his group of friends for the first week or so. With good intentions (in middle-school sense) he told me that I was not to get all problems correct on a math test or homework, because that’s not cool. I was told to deliberately work every tenth problem or so wrong to this effect.
I decided not to follow this piece of advice. If I wanted a good circle of friends, they first would not fall for gimmicks that make me supposedly look cool. If they did, then they could be considered shallow, at least in part. Because of this decision, I worked hard throughout middle school. So much that I kept a full load of honors courses with a workload to match. In eighth grade, I found myself in honors science, a relatively hard class with a good teacher.
Back in the day we would get assigned seats, of course, and for one rotation I sat next to this kid who needed a bit of help. The bit turned into a lot of help, for which I was perfectly glad to assist, for we had become pretty good friends.
The next seating rotation, we did not sit next to each other any more. That was it for our friendship. I saw him outside of class one day and said hi to him, for which he ignored me in the presence of his cool friends and pretended not to know me.
Because I have chosen not to name this individual, I’ll finish out why I mentioned him. So seeing how he had befriended me for the help, I judged him as being dim-witted and in need of plenty of help. Two incidents thereafter solidified this opinion.
The first was at a dry Christmas party senior year of high school. All the party people, including myself, were seated outside in comical conversation circles. Within our own circles we were conversing with each other.
Now many of my good friends are female, so my conversation circle was pretty much girls plus me and this other guy. In an adjacent circle was a group of football and baseball jocks. With most all sports being segregated by sex, their conversation circle was comprised only of guys, if memory serves me right. In that group was the aforementioned science class “friend,” if you will. Now a star football player, he received a scholarship to (the) Cornell University in New York.
The group began poking fun at me behind my back. I don’t remember the exact dialogue, but it was nasty and I do not care to elaborate for sake of word choice, if you catch my drift. They persisted and then moved on to the other guy in my conversation circle, another friend of mine. He wasn’t so good at hiding that he was hearing the entire insult and controlled himself to stay seated in his chair.
What transpired between the aggressors and the aggressees is irrelevant, so I’ll let you speculate as to the outcome.
The second incident regarding this individual did not happen but half a year ago. By this time, he was in attendance at Cornell and knowing fully well that he was, as my dad likes to call people, an idiot, I was curious as to how he was faring.
It just so happens that I’m friends with his ex-girlfriend, who also attends UCSD. Knowing that they’d broken up because of his infidelity, I asked how he’s doing at Cornell. She said that he feels really stupid there, to which I was not surprised and suddenly finding trouble containing my running laughter.
My second was in high school.
Many of my old friends may sense what’s to come in this second major decision. They would always remark to me stuff like: “You’re so busy!” “I never see you outside of class,” or “Do you have any free time?”
At the end of eighth grade we were led through registration of classes for freshman year of high school—the upcoming year. I talked to a counselor there. She said that if I wanted to get into Stanford, I would have to work extra hard and find a passion that you revolve around. I did both, definitely, but what pushed my chances of getting over the edge to the other side of the curve was a little thing I like to call community service.
My parents used to tell me that I’m really spoiled. When they would utter it, I would hate it. Now, I would say that was somewhat true. While I did not receive everything I wanted, I received everything I needed plus more. I never received stuff like big screen TVs or video game consoles for free, as did many of my classmates, but I never had to fight for food or had to find shelter like so many 40 miles southeast of Thousand Oaks. I was not given a car when I turned 16 (or ever for that matter) but I was given near unlimited access of my parents’. Being a teenage male, my driver’s insurance rates were sky high, but my parents never asked me to get a job to help pay for it.
So I took a look at the world, so to speak. Knowing full well what many of the underprivileged do with their lives—starting on a low note and ending on a high—I should be expected to end on an even higher note, having started from a relatively high note to begin with.
From this basis, I changed in two ways. One is ongoing and the other has already pretty much happened.
The first is that I became addicted to community service. I figured that I should use my ability and good health to assist others and those less fortunate. This is still going on as I try hard to find time perform my passion for service. I donate blood whenever I can (and so should you!) though I won’t be able to donate again until January 2011 due to my recent trip to Europe and my upcoming trip to Hong Kong.
The other is liberal (in the American sense) views (much to the covert dismay of my Republican father). No one person is inherently better than another in the same way that no one country is inherently better than another. In no way should making money be the primary goal for anyone’s life. Why should one person live with $10,000 drapes on every window in every room when someone not halfway across the globe works tirelessly every day for basic necessities? How can the United States call itself a Christian nation and claim to be accepting people of all faiths at the same time? Or for that matter how can the United States claim to be accepting and fail to insure every individual the same civil rights as the next?
While I claim a dislike for the Republican Party, I do not claim a dislike for its individual members, nor conservatism as an ideology.
I included this because as I am a political science major, I intend to write heavily about politics, political economy, and globalization from Hong Kong.
So by the time I was finishing high school I had been involved with at least six organizations. I did community service throughout Boy Scouts of America, including a 440-man-hour, $2,500-budget project for Eagle Scout rank; American Red Cross (of Ventura County), where I was involved as Youth Services Chair on the Board of Directors and Westlake High School Club President; National Honor Society, which does service with a variety of local organizations; Ambassadors Club, for service to the school; Los Robles Hospital, where I assisted the friendly pharmacist with inventory and paperwork; and Thousand Oaks Youth Commission, which gave me an award.
Even though all this organizations dominated nearly every day after school, this alone did not cause me to not get the best of grades.
I had another addition—school. I know it sounds silly, but I had a thing for taking extra classes. Each and every year I took seven classes. Junior and senior years I took an additional class at Moorpark Community College. My final semester of senior I took two classes at Moorpark Community College for a grand total of 9 classes at during my final semester at Westlake High School.
At graduation I was not going to Stanford, I had a ton of community service hours (probably literally), I had a respectable GPA (though not respectable enough for the Ivys), and I was set to go to UCSD with a combined AP-community college transfer of 86 credits (4 shy of junior standing).
My third was in college.
I guess this last major decision was not so much of a decision as a justification. I had not gotten into Stanford or the Ivys. I came to Eleanor Roosevelt College at the University of California, San Diego, to make a name for myself with expectations and disappointments.
Now that I’ve spent my first year at UCSD people ask me how I like it. My response it always the same: my biggest problem with it is that too many people don’t think they belong there. Out of all the first-years I’ve talked to, I can only name a handful that say they want to and plan to graduate from UCSD. In fact, this past year I’ve had two roommates because my first transferred out after the first quarter.
The part that bothered me was that the reason they didn’t feel they belonged was because they felt they should have gotten into college elsewhere. I got plenty of Berekeleys and UCLAs as responses.
At first, I was poised to become one of the many who didn’t “belong.” But what good would that do? UCSD is a perfectly good school and actually turned out to offer a really good education in my interests.
As I’ve explained in previous posts my majors, I have been unable to find comparable programs at other universities; and at none have I been able to find a program as enriching as Making of the Modern World.
Which brings me to my next point. Students are lazy. Well, that’s not my point, but not only are students at UCSD feeling as if they don’t belong, my classmates feel like they’ve had an injustice done to them by being placed in Eleanor Roosevelt College.
Most of the hate for ERC (from those who hate) is directed at MMW. As I explained earlier, I really appreciate MMW. Most complain about its length. One spiteful Wikipedia author claimed that at six quarters, MMW is by far the longest core writing class of all of UCSD’s six colleges.
I dispute that claim. It is indeed the longest, but not by far. Revelle College has five quarters of Humanities (HUM), which appears to be a western cultures and literature course, and an additional quarter of American cultures, making their grand total six. Sixth College has three Culture, Art, and Technology (CAT) lower division classes plus a colloquium for a total of four. Marshall College has three quarters of Dimensions of Culture (DOC), which many Marshall students say is useless, and the administrators are considering adding a fourth. Warren College has two writing courses plus Ethics for a total of three. And Muir College has two writing courses plus American cultures for a total of three as well.
So where is this all going? Rarely in my actions and choices have I been overall lazy. The decision to study abroad was no exception. The mountain of paperwork, multiple applications, and the money, just to name a few things. So why do it? I guess ironically going away to another university for a while would enhance the quality of my education at UCSD.
It goes back to when I was real, real little. I think it was my father who gave me an “I’m going to Harvard” rattle. Whether or not he was the giver is irrelevant. My father is one of those who “only wants the best” for me, he would say; and I do so believe in his intentions.
Entering middle school I was poised to get straight As, no doubt. In the big jump from sixth to seventh grade I guess I found myself at a crossroads. At the time it would have sounded silly to say this, and it sounds only a little less now that I’m 19, but I like (as in prefer) to think that that was the end of my formative years in a sense. From then, my opinions have changed; I grew a few feet (I think); I learned how to drive—but nothing unlike that in the course of one’s adult life. I was poised to get into Stanford and remained so until I was rejected in 2007, in December.
Was it stubborn optimism that turned (what I like to think was) misfortune into hope?
Needless to say, I didn’t get straight As in middle school, nor high school for that matter. On the bright side, I didn’t get any Cs (or lower), nor did my GPA ever dip below 3.6.
And here we get to the topic of today’s post. Yes, the two sides are both qualities. And I know I’m not alone in thinking that I have had to make some difficult decisions over the years between two (or more) perfectly and equally equitable situations. In my case, I was caught up by quantity due to my inability to make chose but a few of the many existing scenarios before me.
Was it a good decision on my part? My mother asserted to me, after it was all set and done, “You probably should have done less. I think you stretched yourself out too thin. You couldn’t concentrate on grades and now you aren’t going to be going to your top choice school.”
I replied, “I honestly wouldn’t have done anything different.” And true to my words, my mind didn’t and still doesn’t think anything different.
My seldom-existent inner romantic would say that the heart wants what the heart wants and the brain could not, at that time, overcome the wishes of the heart, for rationality was gone. The heart had become one with the brain and there was nothing to be done.
So in this post I plan to pose three major decisions of quality versus quality (with many minor ones) that I went through. You may disagree; you may agree. All I hope is that my logic shows in my actions, hopefully culminating in relevance to my upcoming study abroad experience.
My first was in middle school.
When I was approaching fifth grade, there was a decision of whether or not to go to middle school. State legislation had just promoted the sixth grade to middle school (junior high school) status. However, there was a large enough group of parents who wanted to keep their kids in elementary school for sixth grade that Westlake Hills Elementary School kept sixth grade.
Why not stay in elementary school for sixth grade? My parents, with my consent kept me at Westlake Hills for sixth grade.
A third of the way across the school district (and Thousand Oaks), a good friend of mine went to Meadows Elementary School. Their parents had voted to get rid of sixth grade entirely there. As such, my friend went to middle school one year before I did.
I got to middle school as a seventh grader in the fall of 2002. My good friend and I were still pretty chummy and I ate lunch with his group of friends for the first week or so. With good intentions (in middle-school sense) he told me that I was not to get all problems correct on a math test or homework, because that’s not cool. I was told to deliberately work every tenth problem or so wrong to this effect.
I decided not to follow this piece of advice. If I wanted a good circle of friends, they first would not fall for gimmicks that make me supposedly look cool. If they did, then they could be considered shallow, at least in part. Because of this decision, I worked hard throughout middle school. So much that I kept a full load of honors courses with a workload to match. In eighth grade, I found myself in honors science, a relatively hard class with a good teacher.
Back in the day we would get assigned seats, of course, and for one rotation I sat next to this kid who needed a bit of help. The bit turned into a lot of help, for which I was perfectly glad to assist, for we had become pretty good friends.
The next seating rotation, we did not sit next to each other any more. That was it for our friendship. I saw him outside of class one day and said hi to him, for which he ignored me in the presence of his cool friends and pretended not to know me.
Because I have chosen not to name this individual, I’ll finish out why I mentioned him. So seeing how he had befriended me for the help, I judged him as being dim-witted and in need of plenty of help. Two incidents thereafter solidified this opinion.
The first was at a dry Christmas party senior year of high school. All the party people, including myself, were seated outside in comical conversation circles. Within our own circles we were conversing with each other.
Now many of my good friends are female, so my conversation circle was pretty much girls plus me and this other guy. In an adjacent circle was a group of football and baseball jocks. With most all sports being segregated by sex, their conversation circle was comprised only of guys, if memory serves me right. In that group was the aforementioned science class “friend,” if you will. Now a star football player, he received a scholarship to (the) Cornell University in New York.
The group began poking fun at me behind my back. I don’t remember the exact dialogue, but it was nasty and I do not care to elaborate for sake of word choice, if you catch my drift. They persisted and then moved on to the other guy in my conversation circle, another friend of mine. He wasn’t so good at hiding that he was hearing the entire insult and controlled himself to stay seated in his chair.
What transpired between the aggressors and the aggressees is irrelevant, so I’ll let you speculate as to the outcome.
The second incident regarding this individual did not happen but half a year ago. By this time, he was in attendance at Cornell and knowing fully well that he was, as my dad likes to call people, an idiot, I was curious as to how he was faring.
It just so happens that I’m friends with his ex-girlfriend, who also attends UCSD. Knowing that they’d broken up because of his infidelity, I asked how he’s doing at Cornell. She said that he feels really stupid there, to which I was not surprised and suddenly finding trouble containing my running laughter.
My second was in high school.
Many of my old friends may sense what’s to come in this second major decision. They would always remark to me stuff like: “You’re so busy!” “I never see you outside of class,” or “Do you have any free time?”
At the end of eighth grade we were led through registration of classes for freshman year of high school—the upcoming year. I talked to a counselor there. She said that if I wanted to get into Stanford, I would have to work extra hard and find a passion that you revolve around. I did both, definitely, but what pushed my chances of getting over the edge to the other side of the curve was a little thing I like to call community service.
My parents used to tell me that I’m really spoiled. When they would utter it, I would hate it. Now, I would say that was somewhat true. While I did not receive everything I wanted, I received everything I needed plus more. I never received stuff like big screen TVs or video game consoles for free, as did many of my classmates, but I never had to fight for food or had to find shelter like so many 40 miles southeast of Thousand Oaks. I was not given a car when I turned 16 (or ever for that matter) but I was given near unlimited access of my parents’. Being a teenage male, my driver’s insurance rates were sky high, but my parents never asked me to get a job to help pay for it.
So I took a look at the world, so to speak. Knowing full well what many of the underprivileged do with their lives—starting on a low note and ending on a high—I should be expected to end on an even higher note, having started from a relatively high note to begin with.
From this basis, I changed in two ways. One is ongoing and the other has already pretty much happened.
The first is that I became addicted to community service. I figured that I should use my ability and good health to assist others and those less fortunate. This is still going on as I try hard to find time perform my passion for service. I donate blood whenever I can (and so should you!) though I won’t be able to donate again until January 2011 due to my recent trip to Europe and my upcoming trip to Hong Kong.
The other is liberal (in the American sense) views (much to the covert dismay of my Republican father). No one person is inherently better than another in the same way that no one country is inherently better than another. In no way should making money be the primary goal for anyone’s life. Why should one person live with $10,000 drapes on every window in every room when someone not halfway across the globe works tirelessly every day for basic necessities? How can the United States call itself a Christian nation and claim to be accepting people of all faiths at the same time? Or for that matter how can the United States claim to be accepting and fail to insure every individual the same civil rights as the next?
While I claim a dislike for the Republican Party, I do not claim a dislike for its individual members, nor conservatism as an ideology.
I included this because as I am a political science major, I intend to write heavily about politics, political economy, and globalization from Hong Kong.
So by the time I was finishing high school I had been involved with at least six organizations. I did community service throughout Boy Scouts of America, including a 440-man-hour, $2,500-budget project for Eagle Scout rank; American Red Cross (of Ventura County), where I was involved as Youth Services Chair on the Board of Directors and Westlake High School Club President; National Honor Society, which does service with a variety of local organizations; Ambassadors Club, for service to the school; Los Robles Hospital, where I assisted the friendly pharmacist with inventory and paperwork; and Thousand Oaks Youth Commission, which gave me an award.
Even though all this organizations dominated nearly every day after school, this alone did not cause me to not get the best of grades.
I had another addition—school. I know it sounds silly, but I had a thing for taking extra classes. Each and every year I took seven classes. Junior and senior years I took an additional class at Moorpark Community College. My final semester of senior I took two classes at Moorpark Community College for a grand total of 9 classes at during my final semester at Westlake High School.
At graduation I was not going to Stanford, I had a ton of community service hours (probably literally), I had a respectable GPA (though not respectable enough for the Ivys), and I was set to go to UCSD with a combined AP-community college transfer of 86 credits (4 shy of junior standing).
My third was in college.
I guess this last major decision was not so much of a decision as a justification. I had not gotten into Stanford or the Ivys. I came to Eleanor Roosevelt College at the University of California, San Diego, to make a name for myself with expectations and disappointments.
Now that I’ve spent my first year at UCSD people ask me how I like it. My response it always the same: my biggest problem with it is that too many people don’t think they belong there. Out of all the first-years I’ve talked to, I can only name a handful that say they want to and plan to graduate from UCSD. In fact, this past year I’ve had two roommates because my first transferred out after the first quarter.
The part that bothered me was that the reason they didn’t feel they belonged was because they felt they should have gotten into college elsewhere. I got plenty of Berekeleys and UCLAs as responses.
At first, I was poised to become one of the many who didn’t “belong.” But what good would that do? UCSD is a perfectly good school and actually turned out to offer a really good education in my interests.
As I’ve explained in previous posts my majors, I have been unable to find comparable programs at other universities; and at none have I been able to find a program as enriching as Making of the Modern World.
Which brings me to my next point. Students are lazy. Well, that’s not my point, but not only are students at UCSD feeling as if they don’t belong, my classmates feel like they’ve had an injustice done to them by being placed in Eleanor Roosevelt College.
Most of the hate for ERC (from those who hate) is directed at MMW. As I explained earlier, I really appreciate MMW. Most complain about its length. One spiteful Wikipedia author claimed that at six quarters, MMW is by far the longest core writing class of all of UCSD’s six colleges.
I dispute that claim. It is indeed the longest, but not by far. Revelle College has five quarters of Humanities (HUM), which appears to be a western cultures and literature course, and an additional quarter of American cultures, making their grand total six. Sixth College has three Culture, Art, and Technology (CAT) lower division classes plus a colloquium for a total of four. Marshall College has three quarters of Dimensions of Culture (DOC), which many Marshall students say is useless, and the administrators are considering adding a fourth. Warren College has two writing courses plus Ethics for a total of three. And Muir College has two writing courses plus American cultures for a total of three as well.
So where is this all going? Rarely in my actions and choices have I been overall lazy. The decision to study abroad was no exception. The mountain of paperwork, multiple applications, and the money, just to name a few things. So why do it? I guess ironically going away to another university for a while would enhance the quality of my education at UCSD.
Saturday, May 9, 2009
My Nervousness
Recently, I hypothetically asked my mother what she thought of me driving down to San Diego from Thousand Oaks, some one hundred fifty miles, by myself. I will be turning 19 in less than two months and like to feel as though my maturity exceeds my years. She told me that she was unsure, and still felt that it was still too early. While I understand that she’s just being a protective mother, inconsistencies arise, such as the fact that she knows that I take rides back to UCSD with other students around my age with less driving experience than me. I suppose this exception is to make sure I get to school, seeing as the alternatives would be either a three-and-a-half-hour train ride (costing $27) coupled with a half-hour bus ride to campus, or they drive me to school (two-and-a-half hours optimistically) and then back. Anyway, I help pay for my friends’ gas and carpooling is good for the environment, right?
There is one big hurdle that one needs to get over when studying abroad—leaving home. I guess it is a fairly straightforward process that everyone goes through when they leave the nest. Unfortunately for me, I, as well as most of my suitemates (whom I dorm with), have not really left home. We all go home for breaks, most of us have gone home more than once during each of our three quarters (each quarter consisting of eleven weeks), and first and foremost, we refer to our former domiciles as “home,” and refer to the act of visiting as “going back [home].” Last quarter, my roommate went back to Glendale six or seven weekends out of the ten, and another suitemate went home every weekend until just a month ago and still goes back frequently. I really am no different. Fall quarter, my family visited me once, and I went home once. Winter quarter, I went home twice and my family visited me once. This current spring quarter, my mother has visited me once, and my family plans to visit me the weekend after next, both occasions regarding orientation for study abroad.
My home is in Thousand Oaks, where I was born and raised. I can point to minute landmarks and show whoever cares to where I reached milestones in my life, just the way my parents intended. Don’t get me wrong—I love La Jolla. The weather’s great and insects are few; there is much more diversity here than the suburban community close to my heart, and I can see the blue Pacific from by window. In fact, the similarities between La Jolla and Thousand Oaks, particularly around Westlake High School (where I graduated), are plenty. In a sentence—it’s full of old rich people. There are many nice cars, crime is low, and drivers are bad. It reminds me of home in my own personal way and I’m glad to have it. So in a different way, I have not yet left home. My new town is reminiscent of the old and I have yet to start seeing my family any more than three times a year. Therein lies my stage in life.
Well, I purchased my round-trip ticket from Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) to Hong Kong International Airport (HKG) a couple weeks ago, and ever since my nervousness has been building steadily. I told my mother of this increase when she was here the other weekend. I received the response, “Why?” Simple and succinct, her one word said a thousand. Did you do something wrong? Did you miss a deadline…oh no, did you miss a housing deadline? It would have been a good thing she didn’t say it out loud, but her intonation gave her utterance meaning, possibly including meaning she didn’t mean to give.
My mother used to live in Hong Kong during her early childhood back in the day, so I’m not sure she understands the full gravity behind my nervousness. Previously, my family visited China for two weeks with a tour group. We visited Beijing, Xian, Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Suzhou, all of which in central and northern China. Hong Kong, on the other hand, is in southern China (along with the good food, my mother tells me!). It was a good experience in every sense. Not only did we experience a slice of culture, we also got too see the developing country in development. There were construction cranes everywhere, and unfortunately the cities were masked in pollution. My brother and I realized the extent of our language barriers (my brother’s more than mine).
Will Hong Kong be enshrined in smog? Will it be hot and humid like the rest of China during most of the year? I already know I will have to give up my California weather—but to what extent? I suppose I will find out soon enough. How will the people be? Will the people spit all over the ground like they did in Beijing? Will the people lift their shirts halfway up their chests so as to mitigate the heat as the men did in Xian? Only time will tell I guess.
And back to my family—I will not likely see them during the four-month semester, nor will they likely see me. Whereas I do not think this is going to be a problem on my end, I know my mother has different feelings, to which I answer, “Well at least I’m not leaving for the whole year.” Little consolation, I know.
Recall that she is currently against the idea of me driving to San Diego myself—a distance of one hundred fifty miles. Hong Kong is seven thousand, two hundred miles away (or forty-eight times the distance), on a journey I will be taking by myself, crowded onto a Boeing 747 “Jumbo-Jet” with some four hundred fifty other people. I know that she will be worrying about me and my safety, and while I tell her that I’ll be okay and there’s nothing to worry about because I’ll watch myself, I know that she will remain worried until the whole episode is over and done with.
This is evidenced by the first time I came home by train. I had a 6:35 p.m. train from Oceanside going north to Los Angeles Union Station; and from there I had a bus leaving at 9:30 p.m. for arrival in Simi Valley at 10:40 p.m. Now, I am confident in my directional bearings more than the average bear, and my parents know of my keen abilities (such as being nocturnal). Nevertheless at 6:15 p.m. my father called me to see if I was at the train station yet. On a side note, I realize this whole time I’ve been focusing on my mother. That’s not to say that my father doesn’t care, I just don’t know if in his silent ways he worries about me in the same way. Because of this, I do not know whether he called me on his own accord or whether my mother had him call me. My parents claim to put up a unified front, so I’ll treat this matter as such.
Anyways, I told him yes, that I am at the train station, on the proper platform, and I will call him when I board the train. The train was late by five minutes. At 6:40 p.m., as I was entering the train, my father called me worried because I did not call him shortly after 6:35 p.m. I cleared things up, but before we hung up, he made sure I was on the correct train (keep in mind that trains don’t come any more often than three or four in any given hour on one of two platforms) and that I had my ticket still.
At Union Station in Los Angeles, I boarded the bus and called my parents again to update them. My father wanted to make sure I was on the correct bus again. I told him I was sure because it had the correct number on it as well as the destination Santa Barbara, along which was Simi Valley, the driver accepted my ticket without a problem, and the bus-loading lot was populated with one bus—the one I got on.
In Chatsworth (one stop before Simi Valley), I texted him to tell him of my whereabouts. I didn’t call because there were people on the bus sleeping.
“I’m in chatsworth. I should be in simi by 1045”
I was texting my brother’s phone, which my parents borrowed to pick me up. My parents, having never owned a cell phone personally except for a short stint in 1994, much less one with texting abilities, made an attempt to reply.
“O 2 n i k 2 m m m” I read it and lol-ed.
Anyways, I got there and saw my parents a couple hundred feet away. I began walking to them when I saw my mother flaring her hands about to get my attention, for fear that I may go the wrong direction, though I was clearly going towards them. It was like a corny movie, a scene that was bound to happen. In the car during the ride home they told me how they were so worried because the bus was fifteen minutes late and that it was night, to which I smiled.
Multiply that by 48 for the difference in distance and 4 for the difference in time gone without seeing each other, and we’ll see where we are then.
*
There is one big hurdle that one needs to get over when studying abroad—leaving home. I guess it is a fairly straightforward process that everyone goes through when they leave the nest. Unfortunately for me, I, as well as most of my suitemates (whom I dorm with), have not really left home. We all go home for breaks, most of us have gone home more than once during each of our three quarters (each quarter consisting of eleven weeks), and first and foremost, we refer to our former domiciles as “home,” and refer to the act of visiting as “going back [home].” Last quarter, my roommate went back to Glendale six or seven weekends out of the ten, and another suitemate went home every weekend until just a month ago and still goes back frequently. I really am no different. Fall quarter, my family visited me once, and I went home once. Winter quarter, I went home twice and my family visited me once. This current spring quarter, my mother has visited me once, and my family plans to visit me the weekend after next, both occasions regarding orientation for study abroad.
My home is in Thousand Oaks, where I was born and raised. I can point to minute landmarks and show whoever cares to where I reached milestones in my life, just the way my parents intended. Don’t get me wrong—I love La Jolla. The weather’s great and insects are few; there is much more diversity here than the suburban community close to my heart, and I can see the blue Pacific from by window. In fact, the similarities between La Jolla and Thousand Oaks, particularly around Westlake High School (where I graduated), are plenty. In a sentence—it’s full of old rich people. There are many nice cars, crime is low, and drivers are bad. It reminds me of home in my own personal way and I’m glad to have it. So in a different way, I have not yet left home. My new town is reminiscent of the old and I have yet to start seeing my family any more than three times a year. Therein lies my stage in life.
Well, I purchased my round-trip ticket from Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) to Hong Kong International Airport (HKG) a couple weeks ago, and ever since my nervousness has been building steadily. I told my mother of this increase when she was here the other weekend. I received the response, “Why?” Simple and succinct, her one word said a thousand. Did you do something wrong? Did you miss a deadline…oh no, did you miss a housing deadline? It would have been a good thing she didn’t say it out loud, but her intonation gave her utterance meaning, possibly including meaning she didn’t mean to give.
My mother used to live in Hong Kong during her early childhood back in the day, so I’m not sure she understands the full gravity behind my nervousness. Previously, my family visited China for two weeks with a tour group. We visited Beijing, Xian, Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Suzhou, all of which in central and northern China. Hong Kong, on the other hand, is in southern China (along with the good food, my mother tells me!). It was a good experience in every sense. Not only did we experience a slice of culture, we also got too see the developing country in development. There were construction cranes everywhere, and unfortunately the cities were masked in pollution. My brother and I realized the extent of our language barriers (my brother’s more than mine).
Will Hong Kong be enshrined in smog? Will it be hot and humid like the rest of China during most of the year? I already know I will have to give up my California weather—but to what extent? I suppose I will find out soon enough. How will the people be? Will the people spit all over the ground like they did in Beijing? Will the people lift their shirts halfway up their chests so as to mitigate the heat as the men did in Xian? Only time will tell I guess.
And back to my family—I will not likely see them during the four-month semester, nor will they likely see me. Whereas I do not think this is going to be a problem on my end, I know my mother has different feelings, to which I answer, “Well at least I’m not leaving for the whole year.” Little consolation, I know.
Recall that she is currently against the idea of me driving to San Diego myself—a distance of one hundred fifty miles. Hong Kong is seven thousand, two hundred miles away (or forty-eight times the distance), on a journey I will be taking by myself, crowded onto a Boeing 747 “Jumbo-Jet” with some four hundred fifty other people. I know that she will be worrying about me and my safety, and while I tell her that I’ll be okay and there’s nothing to worry about because I’ll watch myself, I know that she will remain worried until the whole episode is over and done with.
This is evidenced by the first time I came home by train. I had a 6:35 p.m. train from Oceanside going north to Los Angeles Union Station; and from there I had a bus leaving at 9:30 p.m. for arrival in Simi Valley at 10:40 p.m. Now, I am confident in my directional bearings more than the average bear, and my parents know of my keen abilities (such as being nocturnal). Nevertheless at 6:15 p.m. my father called me to see if I was at the train station yet. On a side note, I realize this whole time I’ve been focusing on my mother. That’s not to say that my father doesn’t care, I just don’t know if in his silent ways he worries about me in the same way. Because of this, I do not know whether he called me on his own accord or whether my mother had him call me. My parents claim to put up a unified front, so I’ll treat this matter as such.
Anyways, I told him yes, that I am at the train station, on the proper platform, and I will call him when I board the train. The train was late by five minutes. At 6:40 p.m., as I was entering the train, my father called me worried because I did not call him shortly after 6:35 p.m. I cleared things up, but before we hung up, he made sure I was on the correct train (keep in mind that trains don’t come any more often than three or four in any given hour on one of two platforms) and that I had my ticket still.
At Union Station in Los Angeles, I boarded the bus and called my parents again to update them. My father wanted to make sure I was on the correct bus again. I told him I was sure because it had the correct number on it as well as the destination Santa Barbara, along which was Simi Valley, the driver accepted my ticket without a problem, and the bus-loading lot was populated with one bus—the one I got on.
In Chatsworth (one stop before Simi Valley), I texted him to tell him of my whereabouts. I didn’t call because there were people on the bus sleeping.
“I’m in chatsworth. I should be in simi by 1045”
I was texting my brother’s phone, which my parents borrowed to pick me up. My parents, having never owned a cell phone personally except for a short stint in 1994, much less one with texting abilities, made an attempt to reply.
“O 2 n i k 2 m m m” I read it and lol-ed.
Anyways, I got there and saw my parents a couple hundred feet away. I began walking to them when I saw my mother flaring her hands about to get my attention, for fear that I may go the wrong direction, though I was clearly going towards them. It was like a corny movie, a scene that was bound to happen. In the car during the ride home they told me how they were so worried because the bus was fifteen minutes late and that it was night, to which I smiled.
Multiply that by 48 for the difference in distance and 4 for the difference in time gone without seeing each other, and we’ll see where we are then.
*
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