Zoom In

When I wrote this, I was sitting on the ground with my back against a tree.

Right now, I’m typing at my desk.

I’m completely still, but I'm hurtling through space faster than I could imagine. This planet is not stationary, and so even though I think that I’m not moving, the opposite is actually true. Zoom out (and out, and out), and I’m really spinning through space as my planet circles the Sun. None of us are ever still.

Stay zoomed out. Earth is a tiny blue-green ball wrapped in filmy shreds of clouds. There are seven billion people on that tiny blue-green ball, and the universe doesn’t care. We’re tiny specks, too small to see. It’s like looking at a sample of pond water--you don’t realize there’s anything there until you zoom in.

Repost From the Weekly Blog: Blankets Can't Do It All

At one point in my life I was convinced that my blanket was a fully-functioning monster shield. I mean, it’s not that I really believed in monsters. During the day, it was always easy enough to look inside the closet and under the bed to confirm that nope, monsters did not live in my bedroom. And if I couldn’t see them, I reasoned, then the monsters didn’t exist. 

Repost From the Weekly Blog: Rambles

Read more rambles here.

I really want to believe that I'm invincible.

I know that's impossible, though. Maybe what I really want is to believe that people will always do the right thing, so that I won't have to be invincible. For a lot of the summer, I wandered around Berkeley and just photographed whatever I felt like (and I have talked and blogged about this so much that you're probably really tired of hearing about it, but it was amazing). Berkeley apparently has this reputation for being a little eccentric, and I probably walked around waving my camera in places where a waving camera was not welcome, but I never wanted to stop.

~~~

When I was a freshman, I was obsessed with defying stereotypes. I decided to be obsessed with English, because most Asian kids were not, so I joined the book club and raised my hand all the time in English class. I decided to like math, because even though that fit right in with the Asian stereotype, it was something that girls weren't always seen as being good at. I decided to be proud that I couldn't speak Mandarin or Japanese, because it meant that I would be that much less stereotypically Asian (and also that I could tell myself that I wouldn't have to be embarrassed every time I had to say that no, I didn't speak Chinese.) Defying stereotypes was my obsession, and while I can't say that I have outgrown that, it's something that I think about less. Whether that's because I want to pretend that I don't need to defy stereotypes to be myself anymore, or because being myself now involves not defying stereotypes, I'm not sure. Either way, though, it is impossible not to cringe at certain stereotypes.

Earlier, I mentioned being That Asian Family. I'm talking about the family that takes pictures everywhere with a gigantic camera, while obstructing traffic, and takes twenty minutes to order food because it has to be just right, and pays in exact change down to the penny while the people behind tap their feet in impatience. On vacation, my family does every single one of those things. My parents want to take pictures, and so we shuffle around and obstruct traffic as people duck quickly past the camera lens. My mom bought a pack of gum at CVS, and she paid in 99 cents of exact change as the customers behind shifted from one foot to the other in thinly-veiled impatience.
When I was a freshman, being That Asian Family was the most humiliating thing that I could imagine. I thought that people would point and laugh at us, and I took a really weird kind of pride in my un-Asianness. And okay, it is still really awkward to be that family trying to take a picture in front of those flowers, and maybe some people think that we are That Asian Family, but for the most part it’s stopped mattering. Maybe that’s maturity, or maybe that’s just pretending that family is bigger than what other people think. I’m still figuring that part out.

~~~

I thought that Interstate I-5 might be one of the most boring freeways in California. It's two hundred flat miles through cow pastures and farms, broken up by the occasional gas station and motel. There's an understated beauty to the endless stretches of green and brown, but really, even understated beauty gets a little boring after four hours.

On the way back up from college visiting in SoCal, then, I spent four hours on what might possibly be the least interesting freeway in California. (Of course, even that's objective--I love urbanity and oceans, but maybe someone who loves farmland and cows would really like I-5.) I spaced out for a whole because spacing out is the best way to waste time that I know of, and then I took out my camera (because that's my other favorite way to kill time. Like, I have gone up to UC Berkeley and, without realizing it, spent four hours walking around and taking pictures of squirrels and lost tourists and pretty much anything else that crossed my path.)

Anyways—I-5. I started taking pictures of the cow-chewed landscape and of the sky and of people's cars. (Not that creepy, not at all creepy, and pretty creepy, in my opinion). Where I'd originally seen miles after miles of the exact same landscape repeating like a loop of film, I started to see variety. The details started to pop out—the stacks of hay here and the telephone wires crisscrossing the landscape there. I was still in the backseat of a car traveling up I-5, possibly one of the least interesting freeways in California, but it was fascinating.

Maybe I was romanticizing everything—something I do a lot—but the magic of details is something that I totally believe in. Beauty can be big and bold and loud, and that's one type. The type that I look for, though, is kind of like the human factor—it’s unpredictable and hard to understand because it's locked up in the little things. It's the clouds melting together like ice cream and the fact that the sun is setting and everything looks like it's been dipped in liquid light. It's the details that make up my favorite kind of beauty, and I can't think of anything more romanticized.

An Explanation of My Subheader

“Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” It’s simple thermodynamics. If I shove someone forwards, I’ll either absorb the resultant backwards force because I’ve braced myself for it, or I’ll move backwards. Simple.

The law of conservation of energy is my favorite. Even though the law of conservation of matter promises that after I die, my corpse will continue to circulate as dirt or macromolecules or something, I really don’t care too much what happens to my corpse because, let’s face it, I won’t have any use for it after I’m dead. The law of conservation of matter just promises that physically, my molecules (which, if you think about it, were once someone or something else’s) will always exist in some form or another. Maybe that’s comforting in a kind of twisted way, but it just makes the law of conservation of energy even more special because energy is always energy. Energy is always moving or changing something—there are so many types of energy, but all of them share this concept of motion. (Matter? Matter just kind of sits there while it takes up space and has mass). The law of conservation of energy is like this promise that the world will never, ever stand still or stop changing.

When I was really little, there was this montage of baby pictures hanging on my bedroom wall, and one night I took it to my parents and started crying because I didn’t want to grow up. I didn’t want to change. It’s ironic, really, that at age five, when I didn’t know or care too much about who I really was, I would’ve been totally content to stay exactly as I was. In fourteen years, I’ve gone from total contentment with myself to looking through practice college interview questions and trying to pick out only one thing that I would change about myself if I could. The fact is, though, that although there are tons of things that I would hypothetically change about myself (like suddenly becoming neat or able to make sense all the time), I wouldn't actually want to change them.

The promise of thermodynamics is there, though—the promise that the world around me will never stop changing and that the world will never stop changing me. After all, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Change is coming, whether I like it or not, and I honestly cannot wait to see where it leads me.

How to Disappear Completely

Reposted from Sami's and my blog here.

A long line of daycampers files noisily past, chattering as they go. Some of them look at me strangely, and okay, I guess a teenager sitting on a log and scribbling in a notebook isn’t the most normal thing you could run across, but there are weirder things out there. Right? It doesn’t take long for them to disappear, though, and I have nothing to distract me from wishing I’d remembered to bring my camera along. I can hear birds chirping and water running and in the shade of the army of tall trees surrounding me, it’s not too hard to pretend that I am pulling a Thoreau (or something like that) and writing alone in the woods. Soon enough, though, I realize that I am chewing on my pen (gross) and that I can hear the nearby clanging of construction and the whoosh of traffic rushing by. People walk past every now and then, and dead leaves crunch under their feet with every step.

Maybe this is what college is going to be like. There’s so much empty space, so much elastic freedom. I’m sitting on a log and writing and it’s magical because I am sitting on a log and writing on a college campus. I don’t belong here, and maybe it’s the incongruity that makes this magical. Nobody even realizes that I don’t belong here, but I’m here anyway.

I love the feeling of not belonging, to a certain extent. It’s like being invisible and melting into the wall and pretending that I don’t exist, until I am really just not there anymore. It’s sitting on a log and writing and feeling people’s gazes skip right past me. It’s the magic of invisibility. Maybe I’m just obsessed with this because I have tried way too many times to take candid pictures of people only to have them turn around and glare at me because I’m pointing a camera at their face; maybe it’s just because there is something really and truly magical about being invisible. There’s this Radiohead song called “How to Disappear Completely” and the singer just keeps repeating “I’m not here” over and over for part of the song. It fascinated me at first. If convincing himself that he is not there is the final stage of disappearing completely, it’s kind of chilling to think that it could be possible to convince yourself out of existence. In Harry Potter, in Lord of the Rings, in all the other fantasy books that I read when I was younger, invisibility was a gift. Invisibility helped good win out over evil. There was always a purpose to slipping through the background unseen–invisibility wasn’t employed just for the sake of disappearing for a little while. It was to be so good at not belonging that no one even noticed.

Maybe that is what college is going to be like. A lot of quirky people don’t necessarily fit together very well, but if everyone is unique then everyone shares a common characteristic. I don’t know if that actually makes sense or not, but that’s what college is for me right now. It’s finding people who know how to not fit in, even though they’ve learned everything they need to do to fit in. Right now, there are all kinds of people waiting in a box labeled “college.” I haven’t necessarily met them yet, but some of them think like I do and some of them think so differently that I can’t understand them. Some of them will get me right away, and some of them I’ll have to struggle to explain things to. All of them know how to not fit in, but have learned the right things to say and do and the right way to act over the years. Everyone knows how to be invisible, but no one really needs to be. It doesn’t get much more idealistic than that, but I haven’t had a chance to realize that college isn’t magical yet. Maybe college is really and truly magical and in a year I’ll be at some really amazing school meeting up with amazing people who get me. Maybe I won’t. I really don’t know what college is going to be like, and that’s part of what makes it so exciting. It’s the incongruity that’s magical, after all.

use before

Inspired by Sami’s comment on our blog. And also by her post on her blog here.

I used to think that if I did a cartwheel every single day, I’d never stop being able to do a cartwheel. Even when I got really old, I’d still be able to do a cartwheel because hey, I’d done one the day before. Getting old was really intimidating when I was five. I wanted to stay young and able to do cartwheels forever, because while I didn’t necessarily love doing cartwheels all that much, not being able to do them sounded terrifying.

Of course, I assumed that I would still want to do cartwheels when I was eighty. When I was five, I didn’t understand that getting old was gradual. I thought that life was kind of like driving through a tunnel—everything stays pretty much the same until suddenly, you’re out in the blinding sunlight and you’re old.

Maybe I’m not really old enough to be writing about getting old, but there is something about the finality of age that seems like it is more terrifying to the young than to the old. When you’re five or sixteen or seventeen, eighty just seems really, really old. But by the time you’re actually eighty, you have all these amazing memories and life experiences to look back on, and you hopefully get to realize that you have lived for eighty pretty fantastic years. It's not like a tunnel, like I used to think; as far as I know, you don't wake up one day and think, Oh my gosh, I'm old. You're simply yourself, just like you were yourself the day before. Everything looks the same, even though it's just a little bit different.

Everything has an expiration date. I don’t necessarily want to be able to do a cartwheel when I’m eighty anymore. Instead, I want all kinds of idealistic, romantic things to have happened, and I want to still believe that real life can be magical if I let it. Maybe I’ll want something different for my future self in five or ten years, but even though I know that my ideas and the way that I see the world right now all have an expiration date, they’re a permanent part of who I am right now. If the way that I see life changes even a tiny bit every day, then things will never stay exactly the same. Change makes life fascinating, and so do expiration dates.

I wrote a thing.

                The signs are all the same—“Open” in big red letters, wrapped in blue neon. Some flash; others don’t. It’s raining, and the sidewalks are nearly empty save for a few soggy pedestrians with black hoods pulled snugly over their heads and arms wrapped tight around their bodies. It’s raining, and it’s not at all romantic. It’s nothing like Gil Pender’s Paris in the rain, where lovers walk intertwined in the mist—it’s nothing like that at all. There is no romance here. “Paris in the rain”—say it out loud. It slips out sibilantly—an elegant, mist-dusted, stone-paved city. Now say “Albany in the rain.” It’s clumsy-sounding: a muddy little town with teens in hoodies huddled underneath awnings, and empty sidewalks with gutters that always flood.

That’s all it is, really; the sidewalks empty and the glow of headlights hangs in the mist for a moment, and that’s Albany in the rain. The mystique expected of a city in the rain is not here. Is it the rain that’s deficient, or the town? I’ve been trained to believe that Paris in the rain is romantic—is it because once upon a time Fitzgerald and Antoinette and Hemingway once walked its streets? Is it because we imagine the Parisians do not mind if they get a little wet and embrace the rain instead of shrinking beneath umbrellas and big black coats? Maybe it is all of these things and more. Perhaps there is a love for the beauty of gray skies and the shimmer of raindrop-shining streets that Albany doesn't understand. Perhaps the glittering expanse of the Eiffel Tower and the quiet reassurance of the stone-paved streets lend an aura of elegance to Paris in any weather that Albany can never hope to match.

                But Albany in the rain is home. Albany in the rain is tilting my head back so that all I see are endless gray skies until I’m blinded by the raindrops. It’s the drumming of the rain on my umbrella. It’s the misty glow of streetlamps and the soggy crystalline leaves dangling from the trees. It's rain in June and summer sun in February. It’s elegant in its own way, and though it will never equal the grandeur of Paris, it’s home. 

15 Paragraphs: An Idea Shamelessly Stolen from Ross Honors.

So I think blogging is one of the coolest things ever because you get to talk about whatever you want for as long as you want to, and people won’t get annoyed with you the way they will if you try that in real life. They’ve always got the option to stop reading your blog. I mean, I guess people could technically walk away from you if you decided to ramble about whatever you wanted for a really long time, but that would be rude and might not end very well.

I really hate it when a bunch of people try to talk at the same time. Everyone just gets annoyed because no one can understand what anyone else is saying. Plus, that usually happens when we’re working on a group project or something, and it’s pretty much impossible to be happy during a group project unless you really, really love your group members. And even then it’s a struggle.

I don’t eat unmelted cheese. Is that weird? Yeah, that’s pretty weird. Seriously though, there’s something about melting cheese that makes it taste better. It’s like magic.

I always find it really funny that people call the week before finals Dead Week, because it’s usually one of the most stressful weeks of the year.

So I just finished writing a kids’ book about thermoregulation for AP Bio. It rhymed. Seriously, how do you rhyme with vasoconstriction?

I get really sad when I shop online because there’s so much cool stuff out there and I’m never going to convince myself to buy it all because honestly, no one needs fifteen different kinds of black ink pens.

Waiting in line is supposed to be frustrating because it’s time that you could spend doing something actually productive, but I kind of like it. No one expects you to do anything or to be profound or to analyze poetry; you can just people-watch or look at food or something like that. People-watching is really fun, even though that sounds a little creepy. You can make up stories about them, like Tim O’Brien did in The Things They Carried. Although, I guess the guy that he made up a story about was dead. Same idea, though.

I love photography so much. Nobody questions a person with a big black camera. They just kind of assume “Oh, they’re supposed to be wandering around taking pictures!” and let you get on with your thing. At least, that’s what I always assume when I see a photographer.

High heels are really cool. They’re like free height. And honestly, walking in them isn’t that great, but you probably shouldn’t be wearing heels if you’re going to have to walk a lot. Unless you’re one of those people who’s really good at walking in heels. I’m jealous of you.

 I feel like everyone’s got an inner hipster somewhere. I mean, people spend their entire lives trying to stand out from the crowd—school, college applications, job interviews, and the like all require you to be unique and memorable. Everyone loves being remembered. And similarly, everyone loves being the first person to introduce a trend. That just makes you feel like a winner. Everyone loves feeling like a winner. (Seriously though. “I listened to Imagine Dragons before they were cool!” That’s always a nice feeling. Although, I guess “I listen to Brokenhearted Narwhals, so I’m cool” is a slightly different sentiment. The coolness comes from the obscurity, instead of the fame.)

I hate wearing sunscreen, but I’d hate getting skin cancer even more.

I have a weird fascination with Sharpies. I think it’s because my mom wouldn’t let me use them when I was a kid because she was afraid I’d draw on the walls or something, so now every time I use a Sharpie it’s like letting my inner five-year-old loose again.

In thirteen years, I’m going to be thirty. I feel like “old” is always a code for “older than I am right now.” I definitely remember being eight or nine years old and thinking that Liesl from Sound of Music was really, really old. But now I’m realizing that she was younger than I was—not that old at all.

The best part about Spanish class is speaking Spanish. Do you ever wish that you could wake up and be fluent in another language? I would love that so much. I guess that would make learning a foreign language less special, though, because everyone would be able to speak every language and we wouldn’t even need to have the thousands of languages that currently exist. We could have one language that everyone would speak, and you wouldn’t have to worry about accidentally insulting someone while stumbling through your limited vocabulary in an attempt to find the nearest ATM while on vacation in Greece. Wouldn’t that be boring?

Writing is really just stringing words together in sentences; sometimes you use different words and different lengths of sentences, but that’s about it. The entire English language is just a bunch of letters thrown together in different combinations, but all those combinations are so beautiful and so unique that it’s kind of ridiculous.

It's been a long time since I actually posted anything, hasn't it.

The clouds looked like they had been painted by the hand of God against the canvas of the clear blue sky. It was one of those landscapes too alive to photograph or even dream of recreating, and so they simply sat and looked. They took a moment to pretend that they were not sitting on the burning hot sweat-soaked spit-ridden artificial turf of a middle school soccer field, and that the sharp scent of rubber was not filling the air. Instead, they told themselves, they were at the marina, staring in silent awe at a surreally beautiful sky.
"Sometimes I wish we could live forever," murmured the girl.
"But then this wouldn't be the same."
"This?"
The boy motioned vaguely with his hands. "You know, you, me, us; this."
"Wouldn't it be even better if we could be together forever?"
"Maybe. It wouldn't be the same, though."
They were silent for a moment. A cloud swept across the sun, covering and uncovering it so that the pair squinted for a second in the sudden light.
"There's something about knowing that we've got the rest of our lives to be here. Like, it's not forever, but it's long enough that it seems like it," he continued.
"Wouldn't forever be even better, then?"
"It just wouldn't be the same. The ending is what makes it special."