My New Years’ resolution will probably be to stop starting all my posts with “Sorry for not posting recently.” Whether I do that by just not mentioning it or by actually getting a schedule going is anyone’s guess.

Anyways, here’s what’s been up.

Thanksgiving

Yeah, my family still celebrates Thanksgiving. My dad especially is always going on about how it represents the American values that made his grandparents immigrate here and not Canada, thankfullness and gratitude and all.

It’s a nice sentiment, I guess? I’m not sure if you can just do that though, cause for most people nowadays Thanksgiving is too tied up with colonialism and all. I’m not sure how much I’m concerned with that, to be honest. It’s just a holiday. But I don’t want people to think I’m an apologist or anything.

Ugh, politics is hard. I feel like I’m supposed to have opinions on things? Which is a reasonable ask, but I seem to know so little about the real world. Like people are disgusted when I don’t immediately jump to affirm or condemn something, and it’s just cause I’ve never heard of “plurality” or “Amerisocial Colonialism” or whatever.

We don’t really talk about politics at the dinner table in my house. Actually, we’re quite discouraged from it. If I had to guess my father’s more conservative than my mother but I really couldn’t say.

Speaking of my family, I had Thanksgiving dinner virtually with my extended family. I couldn’t go in person cause the meal took place all the way in California, and we have a bunch of family all the way in Korea and the NNPRC too. So the way we’ve taken to doing Thanksgiving and other big meals is everyone who can come in person donates a phone or tablet. My cousin Yingtian is in charge of clipping them all together to a shelf thing he has and video-calling everyone who can’t be there in person. Everyone who won’t be in person all get shipped some of my grandma’s famous pickled cabbage, and are responsible for purchase something appropriate for the meal at the store thenselves (I got one of those little rotisserie chickens). So we have a big wall of phones at one end of the table, and everyone’s chatting the best we can with the latency. It’s sweet, I think. It’s multicultural across both ethnicity and time.

Or something.

If only family dinner wasn’t such a pain. I swear I feel like I’m being interrogated:

  • Yes, I’m doing well in classes
  • No, I don’t have a girlfriend
  • No, I don’t have a boyfriend (this question was followed with some angry swearing in Chinese)
  • Yes, the war is awful
  • Yes, I hope the PLA defeat the anti-communist rightist other adjectives New Nationals and let everyone go home
  • Yes, I enjoyed the meal
  • Yes, I wish I could be there in person

It’s like I’m a robot reading from a script. Ughh. Why do they even call me if they want to hear only what they want to hear?

Well, “robot” might be the wrong word. The word “robot” means a lot of things. So does the word “human.” I’ve been having some thoughts on that, … maybe that will be what my next post will be about.

I’m almost the youngest in my generation, so I’ve never really been trusted to … make my own opinions? It sounds harsh when I say it like that, so that can’t be a good descriptor, but I can’t think of any better way to say it.

Maybe they’re all scared I’m gonna run away like my eldest cousin Red did. We try not to talk about him.

NeuronDynamix Internship

On a brighter note, I just finished applying to that internship I mentioned a post or two ago. Literally just; I submitted all the forms, took a walk to the coffee shop, and I’m typing this post here accompanied by my reward espresso.1

We get a couple days off for Thanksgiving Break (or well, for “Gratitude Appreciation Break” or something like that), and I spent all of it filling out forms. School resumes tomorrow and I barely have a chance to catch my breath.

But I am really excited. They’re like the biggest player in the admittedly small field of commercial brain-computer interfaces. Most of their clients are in heavy industry overseas, cause BCIs are really good at instant but imprecise control, and that’s kind of a problem peculiar to an industry where the few seconds it takes to press an emergency override switch can cost arms. One of their big success stories is getting a little chip in everyone’s hard hats at a steel mill in India that detects panic, which saved someone from getting run over by a truck.

So yeah, I am itching with anticipation. I think I have a good chance at getting in. Here’s hoping!

… man, my little BCI seems dinky in comparison. It’s just been sitting on my shelf for the past two weeks. Everyone at robotics club agrees, it’s cool but not like, useful at all.

Ughhhhhhh.

Friends!

On a brighter note, I’ve started sitting with Kyra and her friends at lunch. Yeah I know what is this, elementary school? But it’s nice. Kyra and I have the same period around lunch free so I kept seeing her, and one day she flagged me over to sit with her.

She’s really cool. Like she plays competitive Enter Galactica and rides a skateboard and stuff. She also has cool friends. One of them, Michael, spends a lot of time on Dynamo, so we followed each other.

Although she and her friends are clearly quite close, they are obviously making an effort to include me. But they use all this slang I don’t understand. One of them called me an “egg” and everyone laughed their butts off, and then when I asked said they weren’t allowed to tell me and that I’d figure it out shortly enough. I couldn’t tell if I was being made fun of? I don’t think so?

In a way it reminded me of Thanksgiving dinner, being talked over … but it was also not the same at all. I definitely enjoyed talking with them more. WAY more.

… It’s kinda deadening in a way to write about it in this abstract, past-tense style. I might experiment next time with writing a post like a story, instead of this distant 3rd person perspective. I think the situation calls for it.

Anyways, some bookkeeping stuff: I’ve updated the blog a little bit so that the post links come with summaries and word count. I figure this made the front page look a little less boring. I also updated some of the styles cause the bright white text on the dark background kinda hurt my eyes.

Given the shiny new word count, I can see this post has over a thousand words! Dang! I should write at the coffee shop more often.

… this blog post calls for a cheesy ending but I can’t think of one. Maybe something like

Good thing I’m planning on doing a lot more stuff I’m proud of.

and then take off my sunglasses and stare directly into the sunset with a faraway, world-weary look or something.

  1. Hey, TIL I can write footnotes. Anyways, every time I complete something hard like this I go to a coffee shop and get an espresso. I’m trying to associate the taste with feeling good about a job well done, cause I kinda struggle with letting myself feel good about stuff I’ve done. It’s … sort of working. I like espresso now, at least. ↩