I put this question in my FAQ, because at least two people have asked
me this question, and that’s how frequent a question needs to be to be
on my FAQ: I got an IMO1 gold medal in 2012, as a ninth
grader, and an IOI gold medal in 2014, as an eleventh grader. I could
have kept going to either, or even decided to try taking the IPhO or
something, but I didn’t. Why not?
The short answer: It was a rough utilitarian calculation. By
continuing, I would probably displace somebody else who would gain more
from being on an IMO/IOI team than I would. Besides, I wanted to do
other things in high school, so I wasn’t losing much.
I think the short answer actually captures most of my thinking when I
made the decision back then, and it’s not really new; I said as much at
the end of 2013. But behind it
was a lot of complex thoughts and feelings that I’ve been ruminating
over and trying to put into words for the better part of a decade.
Hence, this post.
There is a natural question that precedes the frequently asked one
that I have never been asked, something I am now realizing I never
honestly asked myself and never tried to answer deeply: Why did I
participate in the IMO and the IOI in the first place?
When I first made myself commit to posting weekly, I was trying to
make myself spend a little time every day of the week thinking and
writing and whittling away at old drafts. Instead I’m here at 10:40 PM
basically starting a brand-new post. Oh well.
I meditated a little bit in
Conversations about “lacking
experience or interest in a lot of the commonly discussed culture.” I
think this applies to me and music as well, although not as fully. Back
in Taiwan, when mentally bracing myself for coming to the U.S. for
college, I sometimes worried about not knowing enough about pop music
and bands and not listening enough to popular albums, and having trouble
integrating into the culture for this.
Turns out, among the communities I wandered into and friends I made,
it was a more frequent obstacle that I didn’t know enough about
classical music and composers. Whoops. Some of the names rang faint
bells from either music class or conversations with high school friends
who did do classical music, but I could not identify or remember any
styles or eras, and would remember composers only by unreliable first
letters or unusual substrings of their names.
I’m out of deep things to say. I don’t usually have deep things to
say. Sorry to anybody who subscribed hoping for more things like the
last post. This is basically going to be a personal stream of
consciousness post. But it’s a stream with a long ancestry, since I
apparently wrote 400 words about it in a WordPress draft four years ago.
This was way back before I even started writing post drafts in Markdown
on my computer instead of directly in WordPress, so I guess it must be
an interesting topic.
Four years ago, Brian2012 was suddenly struck by how many
of the people he knew were such serious gamers. But let’s go back even
earlier, shall we?
A long long time ago, when I was in elementary school or so, my
parents had some sort of reward system where I had to do productive
things, like study or do chores or write diary entries or practice the
piano or something, to earn time on the computer for games. “Gaming
time” was a currency. I enjoyed saving up lots of thirty-minute
increments and knowing I had the freedom to using them slowly.
That much I remember; the details of how it worked are very fuzzy and
I’m not sure what I played in those thirty-minute increments either. I
think there was Neopets and Runescape and Club Penguin. (My Neopets
account still sees sporadic activity, because I get really really bored
sometimes…)
One of the most unexpectedly different facets of life during my
internship has been the meals.
I’m not talking about the food; it’s certainly different in a
fantastic way
(Dropbox’s
food (link to Facebook page) is like something out of a high-end
restaurant), but I knew that before coming already. Also of note is the
way I started eating ∞% more ramen over the weekends than I did over the
entire school year at MIT, because here I can’t buy that many groceries
without them spoiling and am amazingly lazy in this new environment.
No, this (deadlined, so not that well-thought-out, but whatever) post
is about conversations at meals, which happen basically every lunch and
some dinners when my team eats together.
I’ve never had any regular experience like it. Of course I’ve had
many meals at home with family, but they feel different because, well,
it’s family and we have so many topics in common. I went to the same
school for twelve years and we didn’t generally use a cafeteria; we just
ate at our desks in our classrooms, or while doing things like attending
club meetings or taking makeup tests. Sometimes if people felt like it
they would push desks together to eat, but eating by oneself was totally
normal. (At last, I feel like that was what it was. It seems so far away
now that I don’t trust my memory, which is pretty sad… I faintly suspect
I would have this experience in a more stereotypical American high
school. But this is mostly just based off the cafeteria in Mean
Girls, a movie I only watched in its entirety on the flight here,
which is weird because I know I’ve seen the “The limit does not exist!”
part much much earlier. /aside)
And at MIT? “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”
I am glad for these conversations over lunch because I get to know my
team more personally (and don’t have to awkwardly eat alone in the
bathroom), but they’ve also given me a lot of time to ponder my (lack
of) conversation skills.
(I’m making random short posts to entertain certain people during
spring break.)
Since air-dropping into this crazy cultural salad bowl of a place,
I’ve met a lot of people whose names get mispronounced. All sorts of
long vowels and short vowels and consonants and word boundaries that
jump across languages unpredictably. As a result, people often acquire
nicknames or alternative names to get called by, whether actively,
passively, or somewhere in between.
In contrast, my name is easy and boring. Now, I rather doubt I’d want
an exciting name, in the sense of a name that everybody mangles in
excitingly different ways. I’m not exactly dissatisfied with people
calling me “Brian”. It just strikes me that I think I’ve gone my entire
life without a meaningful nickname or even meaningful derivative of my
name.
(I’m ignoring the transposition. Why am I ignoring the transposition?
I’m not sure I can rationally justify that, but thinking about it makes
me cringe, which is the reason I’m delicately avoiding explicitly
writing out what nickname I refer to by “transposition”. I will just say
it is rather uninspired… and also, perplexingly to me, used by accident
a lot…)
(So. It’s spring break. Two-week-late post, and somehow by the end
it’s all aboard the angst train again?)
Two Sundays ago, I mobbed with a small group of MIT furries to watch
Zootopia, the recent highly-reputed Disney movie.
(Before anything else, first there were the previews. I was impressed
that every single one of them — there were six or so — was about an
upcoming movie featuring anthropomorphic animals front and center. Let
me see if I can remember all of them… in no particular order,
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, The Secret Life of
Pets, The Jungle Book, Storks,
Finding Dory, and Ice Age: Collision Course.
edit: Oh, also Angry
Birds. Wow, I said, they know their audience.)
I went into the movie with a vague impression that
Zootopia was more adult-oriented than most Disney films —
not in the naughty way, but in general making a lot of jokes and
invoking a lot of parallels that I think only adults might have the
experience to get. My suspicions were confirmed a few lines into the
movie, where there was a joke about taxes I cracked up at but can’t
imagine that children a few years younger would have found funny. If you
the reader haven’t watched it, I hope that was vague enough not to ruin
the start for you.
(To be fair — and, uh, some parts of the internet are kind of big on
this fact — the film also at one point enters a nudist colony.
Fortunately (?),
Animals
Lack Attributes.)
Humor aside, I think the movie also deals with some weighty and
nuanced themes, ones that would take more life experience to fully
appreciate than the themes of most Disney movies. The social commentary
is very clear. Possibly bordering on too blatant for my tastes — even
though the whole movie is kind of Funny Talking Animals, there are some
animal species for which it’s really easy to guess which human
demographic groups they might be symbolizing, to the point where I can
already imagine the other side of the debate. You won’t need a PhD in
literature to figure out the parallels; you wouldn’t even need an AP
English Literature class. But, I think, it still works. It’s like
Animal Farm on training wheels.
This is not Part 3. It’s just two things I thought of tacking on to
part 2.
What can I say? Part 2s are easy blog post fodder; Part 2 appendixes
are even easier.
One, there’s one other wall I run into often during those rare
attempts when I get motivated enough to try to write a story: naming
characters is hard. At least, it provides an excellent motivational
roadblock whenever I even consider committing a story to paper, a point
before I’ve actually written anything at which I think “maybe I should
give up and go on Facebook instead” and proceed to do so. Aggh. And I
think there’s more than one reason for this:
I have trouble coming up with names to some degree. Sure, it’s easy to
browse BabyNames.com and look for choices, but a lot of the names there
are really weird and contemplating them for every unimportant character
kind of rips me out of the immersed mindset.
Reading great stories in English class and elsewhere may have gotten me
feeling like every name ought to be a deep meaningful allusion, or at
least pun fodder. I feel like I will regret it if I write a story and, a
few months and/or chapters down the road, realize I missed a better name
or the name I chose has some undesirable connotations in context or
provides an atmosphere-ruining coincidence.
But I think the real kicker is simply that some part of me is
terrified of the awkwardness of giving a character the same name as
anybody I know, because then they might read the story and wonder if the
character is somehow based on them. And too many of the names that I
consider common enough to not lure readers off into looking for hidden
meanings are used up that way. This is obviously worst if the character
is an antagonist. But it seems just as awkward if the character is a
protagonist in accord with everything I’ve written, i.e. a paper-thin
character blatantly created for escapist purposes. I am already kind of
terrified I might ever meet anybody with the same name as one of my
mentally established characters even though I haven’t actually written
anything about him. And there’s a well-established convention of
not
reusing a first name in a work, so this gets even harder with every
work; I’m just as worried, what if somebody thinks this character is
related to the other character in that story I wrote in second grade? Oh
no!!
It’s like not reusing variable names in a programming language where
everything is in the same scope. Positively nightmarish.
And I actually discovered some evidence this is a thing in my past: I
found some stories I wrote in 2004. They are possibly the most extreme
exemplification of
Write
What You Know imaginable: the main character, Michael, goes to
school and makes friends. That’s all.
Illustration courtesy Brian2004
I kind of want to share these stories, but fast-forward a few years
and you’ll see that a classmate named Michael entered my grade and we
stayed in the same grade until we graduated.
Hi, Michael. You’re probably not reading this, but the character I
created in 2004 is not in any way based on or inspired by you,
especially not this image. And unlike later in this post where I name a
character after myself, I’m not being sarcastic, really.
My mom says I blog too much about myself. I am completely guilty of
that and this post is mostly not an exception. Sorry.
It’s not that I wouldn’t like to write posts about others and for
others. But I know more about myself so obviously there’s
more
I can write about myself. It’s kind of a habit, and it’s been a very
personally helpful habit. I discover lots of things when I write
introspectively. But I’m a very weird person and a lot of the insightful
things I discover when doing this are things I doubt I can generalize to
other people. I tried getting a lot of my friends to join HabitRPG when
I discovered it, but it was nowhere as effective on them as it was on
me.
What else could I blog about? What else do people blog about?
All through high school I had really high standards for myself. Not
the grades, mind you (I admit, humblebrag, my grades were always
uncomfortably high, probably as an expected but still sad byproduct of
this process (yes, I’m actually complaining about grades being too high.
I don’t want my report card to have lots of Bs or Cs, but I really
didn’t need to pour enough resources into schoolwork that I graduated as
valedictorian, when there were so many other personally and socially
meaningful things I could be dedicating effort into creating — but
that’s a subject for another post (humblebrags all the way down.
Somebody get some internet pitchforks and poke some sense into me))),
but simply how I managed my time for doing homework.
In my opinion: not very well. I always spent too much time surfing
the internet and doing things less urgent than homework, then ended up
sleeping at midnight or one o’clock or whenever often to finish what I
should have done earlier.
And yet, compared to many of my friends (definitely not all, though),
that’s not late at all and the amount of buffer time I had between
finishing work and having it due was positively luxurious. But then, I
suppose, I didn’t have the same amount of math homework. But to counter
my excuse, I had additional responsibilities such as practicing olympiad
problems and preparing weekend presentations and translating the school
newsletter. So I don’t actually know if my workload was significantly
lighter than average or not, ergo I don’t know whether my time
management skills were significantly better than average or not. It
seriously doesn’t feel like they would be.
And allegedly, even when I’m procrastinating, it’s more productive
than my friends’ procrastination, maybe even
Paul Graham’s good
type of procrastination. Often when I gripe about how much my former
self procrastinated they will ask me what I’ve been doing and, after
hearing the answer, tell me this. What have I done to put off homework?
Oh, I did some olympiad math problems, committed to my GitHub projects,
read a bunch of programming blogs, organized my old chemistry notes from
two years ago, and surfed the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Yeah.
Total waste of time. Meanwhile certain friends surf 9GAG whenever they
get the chance. (Which is not to say that I don’t procrastinate in
obviously unproductive ways sometimes — I surf reddit, YouTube, and
TVTropes of course. Sometimes I even just read my own blog or dig
through old folders in my computer. I’m weird. But anyway.)
If you came to this blog or this post hoping to read English, sorry
not sorry. It’s only fair, really, given how many people on Facebook
can’t read the massive English textwall posts I’ve spammed them with for
so long.