On November 8th, 2016, Donald Trump was elected the 45th President of
the United States. Along with a Republican House and Senate majority, to
boot.
The world around me is still hurting and reeling from the shock.
Make no mistake, I am scared. I am scared of the policies and
executive orders and legal decisions to come that may strip away many
civil rights and send the environment down a worse track faster than
anyone expected, and I’m barely in any of the groups that have the most
to lose. I have no idea what it’s like to go through this as any of you.
I am sorry.
But I am also scared that this fear is driving my friends and my
community away from talking to the people we need to talk to if we want
to make sure this doesn’t happen again.
I’ve heard a lot of people vilify Trump and Trump supporters.
Anecdotally,
so have others. It’s an understandable reaction, but a fragile one.
60 million people voted for Trump.
Quoting
Wait But Why, “[P]eople with kids and parents and jobs and
dogs and calendars on their wall with piano lessons and doctors
appointments and birthday parties written in the squares. Full,
three-dimensional people who voted for what they hope will be a better
future for themselves and their family.”
People voted for Trump. Why?
Here’s
FiveThirtyEight
profiling a few blue-collar voters.
The
Washington Post interviewing an author who spent a lot of time in rural
Wisconsin.
The
New York Times on women. If the articles’ reasons for voting Trump
could be summarized in one word, it would certainly be “economy”.
But then FiveThirtyEight tempers it a little bit with this reminder
that
Trump’s
supporters are on average more well-off than others. Here’s
The
New Yorker visiting a bunch of Trump rallies. SupChina discusses
first-generation
Chinese immigrants supporting Trump and racism is a bullet point
there, but apparently it’s partly rallied around rap lyrics about
robbery that advise to “find a Chinese neighborhood” to steal from, so…?
I am not going to go any deeper into this rabbit hole. Then here’s
Mother
Jones arguing against the economy being a big factor at all, and
Vox
saying it is about racial resentment. Here’s
Bloomberg
on the Clinton campaign’s failure to persuade and
The
Federalist on “hyper-liberal late-night comedy” and
The
Washington Times on Trump’s optimism. I could find hundreds more out
there just by Googling, and so could you; and chances are if you’re
enough of a voracious reader to be reading my humble blog, you’ve
already read some of these.
It’s complicated.
I had this 5,000-word draft, but I half-abandoned it for being sappy,
boring, pointless, and impossible to rewrite to be satisfactorily
un-cringeworthy. Instead, let me just tell you a couple random stories
and anecdotes that went somewhere near the start. Maybe posting them
will motivate me to salvage something from the 4,500 words that go after
it and post it. Eventually.
Some time ago, Namecheap had a discount, so I bought a domain name
for 88¢. Unfortunately, the discount only lasted for one year;
afterwards, it would cost $29/year to renew. Even though I bought it on
a whim and didn’t have much use for it, I
found myself
wanting to keep it more and more and had a huge mental struggle over
whether I could afford it, because wow, $29 is a lot!
Meanwhile, during the same school year, more or less:
I hate doing things under time pressure, but I have to admit I do a
lot more things when time pressure exists. One of the things is writing.
Another is posting the things I write. They aren’t very good, but
they’re better than writing that doesn’t exist.
(in case you forgot, I’m still posting this pretty much only because
I made myself post once every
weekend)
It’s interesting that I can impose time pressure on myself by
declaring commitment devices by fiat and it works. Other people have
developed other methods of doing this — I recently discovered
The Most Dangerous
Writing App, which puts time pressure on you to type every five
seconds or it deletes everything you wrote. There are many other ways
it’s done.
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content warning: death, existential dread, the usual
I have this memory —
I was a tiny kid, lying in bed and trying to fall asleep, and I
started thinking about death and nonexistence, and I thought about how
one day I wouldn’t exist any more, that there wouldn’t be a me
thinking my thoughts and perceiving my perspective, and suddenly I was
terrified.
I got up and knocked on my parents’ bedroom door and asked them about
this. Maybe. Or maybe I didn’t because the fear was less crippling than
the social awkwardness of randomly knocking on my parents’ door in the
middle of the night to ask them a question like that; I don’t remember.
It was a long time ago, okay?
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 last blogged about music in
2013. I tagged two other posts with “music” since then, but neither
is particularly deep: 8 Songs for 18
Years and Drop-In Filler.
Let’s continue the tradition of self-analysis part IIs from nowhere…
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.
It’s another weekend, isn’t it.
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…)
This post’s topic might be the most controversial thing I’ve posted
here ever. I hope the points I want to make aren’t.
One of the excuses for not blogging I came up with and then deleted
while rambling about not
blogging was that I’m getting more feelings about real-world
real-person issues, things that people take heated positions on — it’s
not topics like what food I ate or what games I’m playing in fourth
grade any more — and my identity is pretty public here, so who knows
what’ll happen. Oh well. I’m probably just paranoid.
It’s also delayed, as the articles I’m talking about are old; the
latest two news items are the shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando
Castile and then the police shooting at the Dallas rally. That was also
really sad, but I don’t think I have anything insightful to say about
it. Let me point you to the
MIT
Admissions post, “Black Lives Matter”, and then for something a bit
more optimistic out of a huge range of possible choices,
this
Medium article.
Although after I started writing this post, the story about
a
Muslim man preventing an ISIS suicide bomber came out, so now this
is mildly relevant again. Anyway, I guess the delay is no different from
how I put up life posts weeks after the life event happens. So today, I
bring you two old news articles about Islam that my friends shared and
discussed:
The second one first, whose argument is, to be frank, weak. I think
this piece from The Atlantic by Wood,
“What
ISIS Really Wants”, is a better-researched overview of ISIS while
still being pretty readable. One caveat is that it’s somewhat old. But
its central claim is quite the opposite:
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.
Wow, this has been the longest silence on this blog in a long
time.
I can’t justify it with lack of time either. Interning at Dropbox
takes up all of my weekdays, but my weekends are much freer than I’m
used to. I carelessly let two weeks at home in Taiwan pass by without
doing much about blogging, and once again a lot of my few blog drafts
have drifted into the temporally awkward zone, being too far away from
the events they are about.
Neither is it for lack of things happening. At MIT, there was the
Senior
House turnaround and freshman moratorium. I can’t even begin to sum
up the discussion around this issue, but I think
the
best response I’ve read is this open letter. Then there’s the
official Senior House
response. But that’s enough links, since I imagine the chances that
this issue is relevant to you and you’d need this blog to link
you to them if you’re reading this are pretty low. (Then again, the
chances that you’re reading this are already pretty low. Although the
chances you are reading this right now is 100%.)