Uncategorized
What I Learned From Grinding Language classes for 9 Months
Over this past year, I’d say my biggest accomplishment was building out my language learning habit and actually improving somewhat in my foreign language speaking skills. So what exactly did I do to learn new languages? I started taking tutoring classes online. Originally, I scheduled weekly classes to learn Chinese. Now, I’m learning Mandarin, Cantonese, Spanish and Japanese. Now, am I learning them all equally as well? Not even close. Read More
Directing Your Life
I follow a couple of various career forums – Fishbowl, Blind, and CSCareerquestions. I’ve been seeing a bunch of people ask similar questions – typically, new grads who’ve moved for a job are lonely and looking for social outlets – Since they’re new to the area, they don’t know anyone, and unlike their hometown or college, they don’t have a built in system for meeting people outside of work. Their Read More
The Feedback Loop: On Incorporating Retrospectives
You ever revisit an old song/movie/book/TV show that you loved in the past, but found out it was actually pretty bad, or dated? Keep in mind, there’s a difference between having your tastes change over time and just visual rot over time. For example, specific genres like action movies usually age worse than other genres, say a romance or drama, because they usually rely on more special effects. In this Read More
Formality vs Informality: Why Blogs are good
You know, when I think of the rise of blogs and how they’ve contributed to destroying our media institutions, blogs are kind of bad. Literally any dipshit with an opinion can opine on a subject they know nothing about, and it can be designated as significant as an expert in the field who has diligently researched the topic. Having said that, they also do the opposite – they can empower Read More
Mammon: Best Idol?
There’s a famous expression, “The love of money is the root of all evil.” Which is a damn shame, because money fucking rules. I don’t just mean in the typical sense, in that money opens up a lot of doors and also lets you buy cool ass shit – I mean in the sense of its utility and the different abstractions money can represent. For example, there’s a pretty popular Read More
Fix My Shit
I’ve been skimming my past blog posts, and it’s the damnedest thing – I noticed my editing is horrendous. Tons of typos, weird word omissions, and in one particular case, it felt like a whole paragraph was lopped off somewhere – I just stopped writing mid-sentence and moved on. I’ve got some ideas about why this happens: One, I either don’t proofread or I skim. Makes sense why these errors would Read More
Magic Food Power Combinations
There are some food combinations that become more than the sum of their parts. Combining these ingredients leads to a transcendent food item. Most of you are probably thinking of peanut and jelly as an example. That’s certainly a good example, but here’s an obvious one that people will probably skip over: Bread. Bread is delicious. Bread is life. At its core, bread is just water and flour. I’d recommend Read More
On Communication
I had something interesting happen while I was shopping for peanut butter today. (Edit for the sake of recall: this post was originally drafted on the 27th.) I was shopping for peanut butter and this older guy came up to me. He grabbed one of the nearby jars of peanut butter and started motioning towards it. I thought he wanted some help from me, so I looked up to see Read More
On Growing and Changing Perspectives
One thing I think about is how your perspective changes at different points in your life. It’s not just the case that you have a different perspective, but as you age, the amount of life experiences that you’ve had only increases. I’d imagine your parents divorcing when you’re thirteen is probably devastating, but if the same happened at forty, you’d probably cope much better. Having a major life event at Read More
On Empathy
I had dinner with some relatives recently and happened to notice the following exchange between a teenage relative (I think between 13-15 in age) and his grandmother. Grandma: Are you done eating already? Here, eat this (starts picking up some food to give to him) Teenager: No, I’m not hungry – *Grandma puts the food in his plate anyways* Teenager: *Grumbles about being ignored* I already told her I wasn’t Read More