Holiday Cards, Part 1

Here are some of the Holiday Cards I made for my friends this year:

These two were a lot of fun. I basically cut out smaller pieces of paper and made snowflakes out of them with scissors and strung them together with floss.

This one was also made by threading floss through pieces of paper. 

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I hope everyone enjoyed their holiday and had an amazing start to the new year :)

Riversong

I love this song:

Riversong by A Fine Frenzy

I laid down by the river’s edge
I laid down wondering where it led
I laid down by the river’s edge
And I woke up in a river bed

There were flowers in my hair
River flowers floating everywhere
And all the fishes came and kissed my feet
Dear old fishes, they said to me

They said oh, we could love you
But we are not yet what you want
Because oh, anyone could love you
You’ve got to find where you belong

All my needles, they were gone so fast
Not a needle left on a branch
I grew weaker
And the river strong
I said, hey fishes
But the fish were gone

Now the boulders
I know they heard me cry
But they were stone-faced
And they stood aside
So I went on at the river’s pace
With my eyes closed, I thought I heard them say

They said oh, we could love you
But we are not yet what you want
Because oh, we would only crush you
You’ve got to find where you belong

How does it feel
To be so certain
Without question
Of your purpose
Your position
Of your place
Of your home?
Of your place
Of your home

You cannot catch the river though
It makes you think you can
It trickles through your fingers
While you hold it in your hands
Just like I am

...listen to it here

(An interview of her is here.)

große Elefant im Zimmer

I can't stand it any longer.

Some of my friends are going through rough times and I don't know what I can do to help.
Today I just talked to one of my friends who is going through the worst time ever.
It was her birthday today.
It was the worst birthday she ever had.
Her studies aren't going well. She was sick and felt like poop.
And all I could do was sit next to her and listen.
I honestly didn't know how to reach out to her.

What scares me the most is when I have the opportunity to make someone feel even just a little happier and I don't know where to start.

Sometimes I'm so mad at the fact that sometimes this place demotivates people. And confuses them and makes them forget why they wanted to come here. They forget about the dreams they had when they first heard about MIT. The ideas that flooded as they wrote their applications. The anxiousness of waiting to hear back. The thrill of getting in. These are moments we all went through and an accomplishment we all celebrated. They weren't just moments - they are life-changers. We experiencing a phase in our lives that we all dreamed about and wished so hard for...

And then it fucks* us up. It makes us do things that aren't like ourselves. It makes us say things we regret. It makes hate ourselves and think we're worthless and undeserving. We forget about our dreams.
*sorry. you get the idea.

I'm a firm believer in dreams. All my proudest moments could only have been possible because I dreamed some part of them. Sometimes my realities surpass my dreams. It's freakin' awesome.
The fact is that we're all awesome. Seriously.
I've felt like a piece of shit many a times at this place, but at the end of the day, I'm insane if I keep thinking that way. If I expect myself to be perfect, I'll fall short. But if I give myself room to grow to become someone better, stretch my comfort limits and keep trying new things, stumble inevitably but learn from my mistakes, jump higher and set new goals, I can get through this in one piece.

I want to get to commencement in one piece. Furthermore, I want my sanity with me. But better yet, I want to be the person I imagined I'd be at the end of college. I want to be proud of me and look back and think, "Fuck yeah, this place was hard, but man, I did some amazing things here. And I'm looking forward to the rest of my life, which will be epic, thanks to what this place has prepared me to do."

And most importantly, I want all my friends by my side so I can celebrate that beautiful day with them.

LOL.

I hate succumbing to using the phrase "lol" but here goes.

Here's to all of us that have a million and one things to do everyday.

I don't know how we manage, but give yourself a pat on the back for getting through another day.

lol.

Rest.

Though I'm not Catholic, I'm going to begin this post with a series of confessions.

Confession 1: I haven't been to church in months.

Confession 2: Today I went to church and fell asleep for most of the sermon and mouthed most of the lyrics because I didn't recognize the worship songs.

Confession 3: From what I picked up from the pieces of me waking up suddenly from the sermon, the passage was from Luke about Jesus sitting with the tax collectors. Which made me feel a bit uncomfortable because in my current spiritual state, I see myself as the tax collector.

Maybe this is because of the nature of all sermons,  but sermons have the tendency of being pretty applicable to everyone in the room in some way. When the pastor kept talking about how we need to transmit the Word of God to all the "tax collectors" in our lives (which I kind of brushed aside because of Confession #3), I did feel selfish about my introspective thoughts. There were other people who had it much worse than me and I shouldn't tuck myself into my private bubble of stress. It was super unhealthy of me. And I started thinking that it was time to change my priorities in life...

But what really got me during the service was the last prayer.

During the pastor's prayer, he prayed that we would all get rest. Rest. Not sleep (though I badly needed that too), but rest. 

Rest - security from God and the constant reminder that God is taking care of you and it will be okay. As long as we do our part (or even if we just dropped the ball epically), God is there and He is good. 

I can't do life alone. Sometimes I convince myself it's possible, but life is so much better with God by myself. He is my Rest.

Oh My Lanta

 xkcd says it all.

Plan Z

What is self-fulfillment?

For the last, oh I don't know, 10 years of my life, I've been annoyed by the kids around me with elaborate life goals that almost sound like prophesies that they are determined to fulfill.

...what the hell?

How did they possibly know what they wanted to do so early in their life? I was madly jealous of them. I still am. I go to MIT - some of these kids have been dreaming of chopping up bacterial plasmids for the last decade of their lives!

But I stumbled upon (not literally) this New York Times article by a man who is now a professor at Georgetown in computer science and he claims that things like passion comes from investing time into a particular project or activity. No one has to know what they want exactly, but choose something and go with it and don't look back. It's unrealistic to choose something and be disappointed with it because you don't feel like it's your life calling. If you stick with something and invest enough of your time into it, you'll grow to care about it and love what you do, even if it's know according to your original plan.

Check out these beautiful words over here.

I think that applied pretty well to my life so far. MIT was not the school I thought I would end up in, and yet by senior fall of high school, it was my top choice. Engineering was not something I considered as a major until I started thinking more about MIT. (I was going to be pre-law!) And I didn't know what I would be invested in during my time here so far. Now I'm involved in quantum dot solar cell research and just gave a poster presentation on it. People came up to me and thought I was a senior. (I laughed really loudly which probably made them uncomfortable. My bad.)
So I'm not sure if the whole solar energy thing is going to work with my degree in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science. When everyone's trying to find the next hottest job (Google, QualComm, Intel, Microsoft...) and I'm looking at the less-publicized startups and consulting companies in alternative energy, I definitely feel like I'm taken the unbeaten path.
   Where will this lead? I sure as hell do not know.
   Will I regret not delving into a hotter field where there is more money? I've learned not to regret decisions I've made. It's so bitter and frankly, you feel like shit. Choose a direction you like and never look back. There's going to be rough patches in any path you take, and the grass is probably not much greener on the other side.

The other day, I saw a sticky that my friend had on her desk:

"Determination is knowing what you want."

For me, I don't know what I want yet, but I know I want to work hard and make the most of MIT. There's a certain law I follow in my head. [It's a law so I don't ever think about disproving it.]
1. If I want x, I expect to get it.
2. If I expect to get x, then I will work as hard as I can to get it.
3. I will get x.
4. Repeat.

There's also a law regarding MIT that I follow to suppress any doubts that what I'm doing is not severe masochism but simple self-discipline:
  I can handle anything post-graduation if it is not as bad as what I've endured during my 4 (or 5) years at MIT.
  A follow-up to that is: The harder the experience at MIT is for me, the more I can endure and survive in the real world.

Now, I don't know how naive or maybe simply stupid those laws are. But if you're an MIT beaver who has floated away from the MIT bubble, I request that you allow me to incubate in the MIT bubble for the entirety of my time here. My sanity and determination thank you.