Setting Up New Goals

So many potential goals

Random Observation/Comment #218: Rejection is a terrible thing, but it’s definitely part of life.  Any excuses I give for my role in the situation will never be enough to ease my mind.  I’m not sure if it’s the disappointment in myself for not being able to think quicker or act sooner (or later), or if it’s just self-pity and self-loathing, but it definitely sucks.  At the end of the day, it’s what you can learn from these situations, so over time I will rise from the lull and rebound.  Rejection builds character.

I wrote about a year ago about goals, aspirations, dreams, and fantasies.  I think it was about time to update this entry with my achievements in the past year.

Since last December, I’ve: finished my Master’s thesis, started a company, went on a small roadtrip to Ohio with close friends, studied abroad in Germany for 6 months, traveled all over Europe (at least 15 major cities), sledged on the Swiss Alps, cooked almost every day in Germany, collected about a hundred more beer caps, started a collection of beer labels, tried every flavor of Rittersport, uploaded about 150 albums to facebook, listened to the full Harry Potter series audiobooks, climbed 3 mountains in Germany, fell in love again, wrote about 100 entries, (almost) wrote a book, got to second round interviews to all the companies I applied to, wrote my first chapter to a comic, wrote a study guide for learning languages (key vocabulary words that are used in everyday conversations for Mandarin, German, Japanese, and Spanish), basically reorganized my life, read a book for leisure, bought my first manual camera, and started at least 5 other side projects.  I’ve been keeping busy…

To quote my previous entry:

“Many of the goals are very short term and involve completing tasks at hand to make myself feel productive for the day.  Long term goals exist as well, but they are much more reasonable and can probably be achieved in the next few years.  The aspirations are for my long term career outlooks and accomplishments that occur in the next decade or so.  My dreams are what I deem as possible, but will require a lifetime of hardship or a whole lot of luck to come true.   My fantasies are things that will probably never happen, but their existence makes me happy and keeps me wishing.”

Goals:

1. Stop procrastinating
2. Narrow down primetime TV shows because they take up too much time in my life (House, The Office, Heroes, Dexter, Colbert Report, 24, Californiacation, 30 Rock).  Better yet: try not to add more to this list.
3. Learn to write more in Chinese
4. Learn to speak fluently in Japanese, Mandarin, German, and Spanish by 25.
5. Get better at cooking
6. Review more restaurants
7. Try more wine
8. Finish the comic book
9. Finish the manga
10. Finish writing book – maybe publish it or just share with close friends
11. Go sky diving
12. Write more poems
13. Add more to my bottle cap and labels collection of beers
14. Finish my side projects list (top secret for now)
15. Take more photographs and improve with manual settings
16. Travel to Japan and Hong Kong before I start working
17. See Natasha again
18. Continue to collect memorable quotes from amazing nights

Aspirations:

1. Get married (hopefully after the love thing)
2. Find a career with flexible hours, low stress, and high pay (maybe this should be a fantasy or at least a dream)
3. Live in NYC
4. Publish a book (autobiography, memoirs, novel, etc)
5. See the Northern Lights
6. Make money from photography
7. Write about drinking expensive wines
8. Get an MBA
9. Save someone’s life – change it for the better forever
10. Own a dog and play in the little dog park with them – yay!
11. Conquer my fears
12. Go restaurant reviewing with my brother – he drives the nice car and I pay for the meals

Dreams:

1. Visit all 7 continents
2. See all 7 wonders of the world (all of them listed on Wikipedia which makes them like 50 based on different organizations)
3. Travel to at least 50 countries (currently at 15)
4. Make my first million by the time I’m 27
5. Eat at almost 80% of all restaurants in The City
6. Early retirement
7. Make a living traveling and writing
8. Learn to fly a plane
9. Own a house that I’ve designed (I would build it, but I’m afraid it would fall down while I sleep)
10. Become as influential as a professor – possibly become a professor
11. Change the world with something
12. Get on the Colbert Report
13. Travel to space – weightlessness would be cool too

Fantasies: (All new sorts of ridiculousness: see last year’s entry for other funny ones)

1. Time travel
2. Obtain Jedi powers – most notably mind tricks
3. Be a part of a heist without any consequence.  I don’t mind getting caught as long as I can say “I want full immunity signed by the President.”
4. Help build Skynet, but go back in time to try and protect a younger version of myself from the governator
5. Chainsaw a zombie in half
6. Sleep with the only hot girl that remains after the zombie apocalypse
7. Carve a turkey with a light saber
8. Extend claws and have regeneration. I would also have ridiculous chops.
9. Swing from a chandelier while having an epic sword fight
10. Curve a bullet around Angelina Jolie
11. Play ping pong against Christopher Walking
12. Lift an entire aircraft carrier from a door while saving a girl
13. Fly around the world so fast that I turn back time
14. Play an Australian guy pretending to be a black guy pretending to be a soldier in the Vietnam war
15. Make a play about a secret relationship that foreshadows the movie
16. Chant “We Are Spartans” after defeating thousands of Persians on the side of a mountain
17. Have a split personality disorder that makes me invent Brad Pitt as my alter ego. Not Tyler Durden; just Brad Pitt
18. Run across the US and back for no reason except “I just felt like running”
19. Attend Hogwarts for 4 years while fighting the dark lord and then become an outcast for an entire movie to defeat death eaters (which will be so much better than the last one)
20. When I get mad (or excited), I turn green and huge
21. Search for a treasure in an ancient temple filled with awesome traps.  Unchartered meets Tomb Raider
22. Go to Vegas and count cards to win lots of money
23. Be able to speak like Mickey in Snatch.  WTF does he say? I hate Pikers.
24. Continuously be chased by the government because I’m a trained assassin trying to figure out my past
25. Sweet Key Lime.

As always, health and continual strives towards learning is what matters most.

~See Lemons Aim, Exhale slowly, and Squeeze

Reorganizing my life

 

anal packing (stop thinking dirty)

Random Observation/Comment #217: Lately, I’ve been going through a weird phase.  It seems I did a full year (2008 Japan trip – Almost end of 2009 Europe Trip) as a frequent blogger and social network user (yes, I realize the addiction). I tried exposing myself to an invisible audience to try something new, and in the process, found one of my all-time favorite hobbies.  The RSI and Ulnar tunnel syndrome in my wrists are not the biggest fans of my constant typing, but I absolutely love writing down my ideas and organizing my thoughts. This is why I have been writing a book.  It needs a lot of work, but I had a lot of fun reflecting on the story.  I guess it was just a part of my to-do list that I needed to get out of the way.  I will finish polishing it during my last trip in November before I start work.

 

I must have missed a phase of self-identity in my youth.  When I looked in my childhood room, I didn’t see anything particularly reminiscing.  It was clean with some scattered memories, but the walls were unfurnished and my hobbies apparently only involved video games and Legos.  I think I tried to make it look like a futuristic child’s bedroom with a messy shelf and unkempt bed.

I lived in Manhattan for 4 years where my apartment became a personal lair with a limited amount of space to keep organized.  The time I spent in Japan and Germany also involved a nomadic space that I temporarily furnished – there was no reason to bedazzle it when I would eventually need to take it down, right?

When I returned to that childhood room, however, it suddenly struck me: This is my own personal spot now and I can make it mine with hopes that it will never change.  Shouldn’t I feel a rush of relief and happiness when I see my old room when I visit again a few years down the road?  I’ve always expected a momentary rush of memories like they do in those movies and video games.

To better represent my space, I hung up old posters on my walls filled with trophies and random collections.  Memories from my trips were strewn throughout countertops to remind me of good times.  For some reason I rehearsed what I would tell someone if they ever entered my room and asked about certain objects.  I was fascinated by how much I could remember just by touching their surfaces.  It was as if I had one of those super powers from Heroes.

After fixing the desk, I looked in my wardrobe and tore everything out.  I refolded my clothes and laid them cleanly on my brother’s bed as if it were my only little fashion store.  The clothes in season were all laid in plain sight and the shrine for my jeans was perfection.  The colors matched nicely and the outfit permutations just raced through my mind.  I was satisfied and at peace.

From there, I looked at my desktop PC and laptop.  Even virtually, there was a mess of unorganized folders and downloads scattered on my main screen.  It took some time, but I redeveloped my naming conventions and optimized the depth of the folder tree with the number of children each folder possessed (data structure lingo).  Basically, at any given time, I want to be able to reach my file without going through too many folders, but being able to narrow down the file at a quick glance.  This would involve categories (as Windows makes with Pictures, Music, Video, and Documents), but to another level (which is the basic purpose of cascading folders).

When I was satisfied with document organization, I cleaned every program I never used and optimized everything I could think of.  I even reorganized my bookmarks, which had grown absolutely abhorrent in the past year.  Cascading folders once again filled the bookmarks and I synced it with Google (since I was using Chrome, it just saves in your Google Docs account).

Next, I reviewed the main websites I visited every day.  I used the RSS feed option to fill my Google Reader and made lists on my twitter to narrow down my desired content.  Instead of going to each webpage to see if updates were there, the updates came to me in one nice package.  These subscriptions increased my efficiencies and I don’t even need to go through the bookmarks anymore.  Streaming videos would queue in my “things to watch” list and website articles would fill the reader.

As time passed, however, I found that it was impossible to read everything.  It was then that I trimmed the fat and removed redundancies.  Do I really need 5 social networking sites? Do I really need 10 different websites for tech updates? Can I really watch all of the Hulu shows?  No one has enough time to just surf without specifically learning any skill set.  I wasn’t exactly reading the news to see how it affected market trends, nor did I read up on specific programming languages or contribute to open source projects.  I basically just looked at things that I thought was cool so I could perhaps bring it up in normal conversation – so maybe I’d have something to post as a status update, shared link, or tweet.

It occurred to me that I had become a consumer of content instead of a producer.  I sat there in front of my laptop just absorbing random interesting facts about the world (while staying entertained), but never really giving back to any community.  I wrote when it followed my daily schedule, but it was the selfish autobiographical nonsense and a ploy to cross off another line in my to-do list.  Even my pictures seemed to have fallen short when I had returned, which made me a little depressed.  I felt like I had organized my life, yet it was all done in a selfish manner.  I can always increase my efficiencies, but what good is that if I don’t use my extra time for an honorable purpose?

I felt that same golden arrow of consumerism I see in our economy.  Instead of trading money for materialistic things, we’re just trading time for random knowledge.  I must admit that if the majority content consumer did not exist, then there would be no use for the knowledge contributors.  Another supply and demand principle, yet I can’t help but think that this content is a different monster – it has many more dimensions of creativity and I believe that everyone can contribute in their own way.

It’s not so much that I have been procrastinating my work (although it is definitely a result) – I think I’ve just been distracted by the overwhelming amount of interesting work that others are producing.  It is this realization, however, that I find myself reborn (so to speak). I am more feverishly motivated to lay down my ground works while I still have the free time.  If I ever want to complete my long list of goals, which I will revamp and list in my next entry, I need to plan accordingly.  Reevaluation of goals – I hope others can follow suite; maybe not to publish to the world, but just to keep their compass pointing in the right direction.

~See Lemons Reorganize and Contribute

Finding a Parent’s Perspective

Random Observation/Comment #215: I’ve written all of these entries with full awareness that my parents and my brother are the biggest fans of my writings.  Entries, like this one, are obvious ploys to show them that I’ve matured.  Well, I guess no matter how much I seek independence; I will always want them to be within my close group of personal advisors.

I have been very fortunate to have been brought up in a stable and happy family with only positive intentions towards my success.  I was sheltered at a young age, my friends were frequently screened, and my independence was maintained by a hovering, yet genuinely concerned, presence to insure that my foundation was soundly built.  Raised as a traditional Chinese boy, I always found it necessary to earn my parents’ trust.  Typical American ideas involving short cuts and reaping rewards by sneaking around the rules was unheard of in my upbringing.  For example, I was told that I needed to finish my homework before I could watch TV.  My thinking was straightforward and simple: I finished my homework quickly and then I got to watch TV.  On the other hand, I know plenty of friends who would just lie about finishing homework and then just watch TV anyway.  I don’t think it was the case that I wasn’t clever enough to use the concept of lying, but instead, I valued the trust with my parents and continually strived for their affection and approval.

Their praises were few and far between, but when I saw proud parents, I, too, became that much happier.  It made sense because our goals were one and the same.  I was motivated by the constant push and they motivated me because I (and my brother) was their largest projects.  It’s that unconditional love for something that I have not yet to understand.  If you’ve dedicated your life to a complicated project for the past 23 years, and you know you will be there for it moving forward as long as you live, I don’t understand how you could imagine doing anything to harm them.  It is under this logic that I will always value my parents’ judgment (as long as they maintain their sanity).  They may be out of touch with the newest trends and next generation technology, but I’m sure they know a lot more about struggling, suffering, and happiness than I can ever imagine.   Although they may not know too much about the path I’m walking, their experience is worth the listen and their stories can help make the path ahead more predictable.

So when I sometimes fabricate exciting stories to cover some of the malicious happenings in my life, I wonder how highly my parents think my levels of deceit have progressed to sift through fact and fiction.  Do they automatically consider my believable activities magnified or would they realize that sometimes there are just boring days?  With full awareness of this back and forth game, I actually expect my parents to find the clues of inconsistency I carefully scatter.  It keeps all of us on our toes treating every night as a mystery.  I guess they would be happy to know that I’m alive and well, but I’ve always sensed that parents have always (and will always be) nosy about their child’s life.

For example, if I owned a puppy (let’s call him William Jefferson), I would probably always want to know where he was and what he was doing to make sure that he would be healthy and happy.  The truth is, as children, we’re not a cute fluffy poof-ball like Willy, and we do have the ability to learn our own ways of doing things.  We all search for independence, and we all want some sort of control over our own lives to make sense of it.

There are plenty of parenting books out there teaching parents how to raise a child the “right way,” but I think it should start much earlier.  Although children shouldn’t be burdened with the responsibility expected from an adult, it is necessary for them to peer into the future.  I think once they do, they’ll realize how sweet a life of dependence could be.  If it wasn’t for the increase of hormones during our teenage years and odd urge to fit in, I think we all could have been really happy doing things that make us happy.  If we realized how insignificant high school was for a social stature and how everyone basically starts over in college, we would have just lived.  How long has it been since you’ve read a book for leisure? How long has it been since you’ve sat down with your whole family at dinner? There are so many little pleasures that we miss as we grow older…

I will write a separate entry listing the things I wish I knew when I was younger, but there is one fact that changed my perspective on my parents: Parents are people too.  Parents were our age doing the same things we were doing – they’re just a little older and burdened with more important things like maintaining the necessities of living.  More importantly, parents also have parents and they don’t know the next phase.  Honestly, I think they’re terrified thinking about how things could have been different.  It only makes sense that as we grow older, there’s more time for us to make some mistakes.  Did we raise good children? Are we being as good to our parents as we like to be treated when we’re their age?

Either way, it’s never too late to pick up the phone.  If we all just tried to make someone happy then we’d all be happier.   Thank you for the wonderful childhood. I think you need to write down some guidelines for parenting.

~See Lemons Think Older

Life is All About Side Projects

Life. You see it, right?

Random Observation/Comment #213:  The more time I spend in New York, surrounded by the wonderful, fast-paced life style, the more I also begin to miss being in Europe. There were so many quirks there that made me happy, but I should realize that I was on vacation; and a vacation lifestyle is definitely not the productive one.  I grew in a liberal arts fashion with new passions towards living life, but I lost a piece of my technical approach (which was getting borderline nerdy anyway).  It’s odd continually separating these two worlds, but I’m not really sure why I’m trying to make such distinctions.  I changed my fashion and my organization in the past few weeks, and a new project is on the brink of initiation.  I will run the alpha once I have time to myself where I’m not distracted by amazing shows like Dexter, Californiacation, and House, and also not studying for upcoming interviews.

I’ve found that the method of leading a good life can be broken down to a few major rules.  None of these are intended to be religious in any way, but of course, they could probably be interpreted that way.

• Keep a separate hobby from your career. Granted, your career can be a hobby (like programming, if you’re Nerdy McNerderson), but you should realize that other hobbies need to exist to keep things interesting.  Life is about what you do with your free time.  As we grow older and our scope of responsibility widens, we lose those precious moments to ourselves, so make sure you find your personalized and perfected relaxation routine (glass of red wine chatting with friends) or happy pass-time routines (ping pong or reading a good sci-fi novel).  Personally, it would be writing, photography, and testing random startup ideas, which I feel balances the technical aspect with a healthy dosage of those liberal arts things.
• Make lots of short-term goals and finish them to stay productive. There’s a high level of satisfaction for me when I check off to-dos because they make me feel more efficient.  It might be the engineer thing, but I can’t stay still.  If you could, try to make these goals related to those hobbies.  This is basically the idea of staying organized, but you get much more done when these goals mold with your free-time and stray away from obligations.
• Stay social and connected to a community. Whether it’s keeping up (cough, stalking) with your friend’s facebook updates, calling up friends to get slightly involved (just the tip) with their issues, or texting clever messages to random people, it’s nice to be involved in something.  You know that warm and fuzzy feeling you get when someone calls you up to invite you to go out to an event?  It’s a sense of being on someone’s mind and it just makes everyone more cheerful.  Everyone likes to get invited, so if you’re doing something; spread the joy.
• Make observations about the world and try to see that bigger picture. There’s a level of ignorance that can be tolerated, but there’s just so much out there to learn.  Stuff you own is just stuff.  That materialistic world may make you feel better, but it can all be taken away.  Some people use faith as there guiding path, but I prefer to use knowledge.  I’m not saying, “Let’s crack open the internet and start absorbing it into our own memory.”  That’s just ridiculous.  I’m suggesting to make connections and to be savvy in specific subjects.  There’s no way you could be an expert of everything, but you just need to have your own thing.  For example, if I wanted to talk about theology, I’d chat with Justin.  If I wanted to talk about graffiti and tattoos, I’d talk to James.  If I wanted to talk about video games and the Rangers, Jake would give his feedback.  Hint: try not to be the expert of sitting around watching prime time TV shows on hulu.
• Add a bit of randomness to your life. Routines are incredibly comfortable, but really nasty when taken to an anal extreme.  The most organized person in the world counting tooth-brush strokes and walking the same optimized path (like in that Will Ferrell movie) sounds highly efficient and should probably make me pitch a partial, but the truth is: I wouldn’t be able to hold that up.  Probably me, more than most people, love to have control over their own life, but I’ve found that sometimes you just need to let go and add some spontaneity.  If you don’t, you’re just a zombie consumer going through a set routine – granted, it might be the best routine ever, but you lose your edge when you get used to everything around you.
• Stay healthy. All of the above doesn’t make a difference if you’re unable to do the things you love.  Make decisions that keep yourself and everyone around you content.  Life is already so short and we’re already so fragile.  Take breaks when you’re overwhelmed and make sure work or fun doesn’t get in the way of your future’s well-being.  Hint: Don’t drink too much, even though it’s super social and fun.

I made this list on the train ride to an interview, but I try my best to maintain these simple principles.  Most of it may be common sense, but there are a lot of these things I wish I knew before starting university.  For example, if I knew the importance of teamwork, I would have begun study sessions and problem set collaboration much earlier.  It’s all about using your resources and making sure you include that “liberal arts” world into your everyday life.

Does this mean I support a liberal arts degree now?  A Liberal Arts major is basically: “I don’t know what I want to do with my life when starting college so let me take any type of class I want to see what I’m interested in.”  You’re supposed to change degrees within the University when you figure out what you want to do.  Unfortunately, students abuse this system by taking the classes with the least amount of work, and thus, the most amount of partying.  Even if you say, “No, that’s definitely not me,” you’d be surprised at how much your peers affect your decisions.  Besides, college is also about learning how to learn and practicing your social skills so you can communicate better in the real world, so a bit of partying is necessary.

I haven’t been to the next stage in my life yet, but I’m pretty sure many things change when that popularity narrows down to a few close friends and your significant other.  Maybe facbeook will revolutionize things, but by TV shows (which is pretty much real life), the couples play-date thing is right around the corner.  Make the most out of your freedom!  Carpe Diem!

~See Lemons Always Busy

Writing for You or Writing for Me?

Confusion

Random Observation/Comment #203: I seem to make more interesting observations and comments in my twitter feed.  They are definitely more succinct and directly relate to my everyday life.  I’m tempted to remove this section, but I really like how I’m keeping track of the posts with the comment numbers.

Ever since I’ve started writing, I’ve been trying to cling on to some type of purpose behind my entries for sanity and time efficiency reasons.  After a little more than a year, I’ve found that I have no idea what I’m actually writing about.  I’ve veered off topic so many times that it just jumbles between traveling and careers and just randomness.  And, even though there are multiple cases where I’ve tried desperately to find some coordination and path, I simply just forgot about the nice structure one arbitrary day and reverted to writing what comes to mind about my current situations.

It was on such a day (the ones where you feel like your memory has been wiped) that I bombarded myself with a slew of questions: Do I really want to write about the little details of my crazy adventures, or do I want to share my opinion and impressions about each place I’ve visited to help others make a choice?  Would people rather read about my version of a Wikipedia article on each city I’ve visited, or should I just write some ridiculous story?  Is the advice I draw from my experiences the value or are the experiences themselves more entertaining?  Should I make my conclusions or should I leave it open to interpretation?  Am I slowly becoming more humanities and losing track of my engineering straight-forwardness?

I found that these questions flooded my mind for one particular underlying reason.  I subconsciously felt that my writing was no longer for myself, but rather to please an audience of eyes.  Even though I may never see their faces or see un-typed responses, I have created my own stage.  It’s the stage in where you look out and you’re blinded by the spotlight.  It’s basically the spewing of some type of information to silhouettes.  I’d be happy thinking this way if I felt this was the purpose I wanted to portray, but I’m torn about the idea of “selling out.”  It’s not like I’m making money off of writing any of this – I’m really just trying to find myself and share these experiences with those who are interested.  But, the idea of shaping my personal reward and gratification on the basis of an invisible crowd just makes me feel slightly mad.

So my dilemma is that I’m stuck in this middle state between committing to an audience-based blog or a personal one.   I honestly fear both to their extremities.  I’ve definitely enjoyed writing in this free-flowingly manner to some fictional reader (or just another voice in my head).  However, my deepest reflections are still maintained in something separate and I’m reluctant to pull these confused moments into my posted writings.  I could write about topics that can easily gain trends and try to increase my viewers, but would I begin to lose my personality?  To put it a different way, am I more happy writing about my life so I could relive it or so I could share it and have others (possibly) benefit?  One I have some level of certainty and the other is in the shadow – somehow I just don’t know which is which.

Let’s try again: How do I explain this blog? Why do I continue if I’m starting to feel an invisible obligation that begins to interfere with my real world?  Each document has become my canvas to paint the confusions and battle the multitude of plausible views to – with any luck – come to a respectable decision or conclusion about my own character.  The interesting part is that I depend on it to work out the problems that are created by this same solution.  It makes me wonder if these problems would stop arising if I just didn’t write about them.  Hell – why not just stop thinking all-together?

~See Lemons Write for We?

PS – As I read back, it seems the painting on this canvas most closely resembles modern art.