For the first time in my life, I feel like an outsider.
If you’re aware of my background growing up, this may seem a little strange. I’m a Filipino that lived for a year in the UAE, about three years in Singapore and then the rest of my life until graduating from high-school (13 years) in Shanghai, China. I’ve technically been a foreigner my entire life, but I never felt like that growing up.
My most successful semesters in university thus far have been when I’ve had a clear reason to and reward for studying.
In my first semester, my GPA was about 8.33 (out of 10), which I attribute to an initial excitement towards getting out of “boring high-school humdrum” and moving to “practical university learning”. Despite achieving relatively high-grades, my enthusiasm faded rapidly after the term ended, as classes felt like an extensive exercise in memorization and regurgitation.
In this age of internet accessibility and dependence, where anyone with any kind of opinion can post it online and reach millions of others, it’s dangerous to let people incapable of rational thought make important decisions like government official elections and vaccinations.
This is almost word for word what I said yesterday at an interview for a teaching assistant position. I said that if I could help even one kid improve their capacity to think critically and evaluate evidence for its validity, that would be reward enough for the job.
There’s a fantastic clip of Kobe Bryant you all need to see.
LOOK AT HIM.
THE MAN DOESN’T FLINCH.
AT ALL.
To be inscrutable is to give off the impression that you thoughts and motives are impossible to discern. Oftentimes, the loudest, most transparent and eager to show off kind of people are all bark and no bite. It’s the quiet, self-assured, inscrutable individual that you should pay attention to.
You’ll often see silhouettes of beautiful people or grandiose feats of architecture off in the distance. Silhouettes, by definition, are hard to make out, darkly shapen and outlined, and yet despite that, you can still tell how aesthetically beautiful they are. I saw recently a picture of a bird about to take flight, captured as merely a dark outline against the rising sun. And yet despite the lack of detail, somehow the elegance of the bird and the strength contained in its wings bled through the image and into me.
I think about my future potential like this. A silhouette in far off horizon, cast against the rising sun.
Recently, I’ve made it my goal to dunk a basketball. Continue reading “The start of a journey”
Trill |tril|
adjective
Urban dictionary: used in hip-hop culture to describe someone who is considered to be well respected, coming from a combination of the words true and real”.
I think there’s value to these characteristics, “trueness” and “realness”, and that they’re under appreciated in today’s social media based and extrovert driven society.
What kind of companies dominate today’s markets? We’ve seen companies like Kodak, Nokia and Blackberry go from the top of the food (business) chain to scraps for the fishes because of fierce competition and changing consumer preferences. Their ends, however, weren’t inevitable.
tardy |ˈtärdē|
adjective
delaying or delayed beyond the right or expected time; late: please forgive this tardy reply.
from Latin tardus “slow, sluggish; late; dull, stupid,”
This post, by definition, is tardy. The prompt came out on January 23, and it’s now February 19, so I have a lot of catching up to do. To my now staggering count of 16 followers, you have my most sincere apologies.
It’s a very strange saying, the “tbh” that has become so popularized in texting and colloquial lingo. People will use this to convey seriousness, to get people to put away their phones for a second and really listen to what they’re about to say. But it doesn’t make sense!
Elon Musk said something interesting once about why he does what he does: “I’m just trying to think about the future and not be sad.” This is his strategy. But what are his tactics?
Ex nihilo writing 