This World and Me

I grew up in a city called Dublin, a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. If there is one remarkable thing about the topography of Ohio, it is precisely how unremarkable it is. I now live in the Pacific Northwest, and whenever I look out the window as I fly out from Seattle–Tacoma International Airport, I always stare for several minutes at the gorgeous diversity of geographic features, from the expansive Lake Washington to the countless inlets of the Puget Sound, from the Olympic Mountains to of course the towering peak of Mount Rainier. After dozing off for four hours, I arrive back in my home state of Ohio, look out the window and see... flatness. It is like the surface of a marble. No mountains, no lakes, no big forests. Just a seemingly endless array of alternating farmland and tiny woods, with the occasional town or village. If I am lucky enough to catch a glimpse of Columbus from 20,000 feet, I could probably count the number of tall skyscrapers on my hands. One unfortunate consequence of...

One chilly morning when I was in fifth grade, I found two of my best friends—let's call them G and W for the first letters of their first names—arguing with each other. The dispute concerned laptops—two laptops to be precise. My elementary school was fortunate enough to have a laptop cart with about twenty MacBooks, which teachers could book for their class to use, kind of like a mobile computer lab. Apparently, that day, two of the MacBooks in the cart stopped working, and either G or W was to blame. The question was who. The relevant facts are as follows. G and W's teacher had booked the laptop cart for her class that day, and G and W, along with one of their friends, a guy we'll call T, sat together for the class. Evidently, G, W, and T were not really paying attention to their class assignment that day and were instead just playing around on their laptops. At some point, G warned W and T that there is a keyboard shortcut in Mac OS X that you should never ever do: ...

eetmn emt ybc lueba illhx When I was in elementary school, my friends and I came up with a "secret language" which we used to send messages to each other without others (e.g. teachers, classmates) knowing what the message said. It was not really a new language more than it was a variation of Pig Latin. What we did was we would write the message in English, then take the first letter of each word, shift it to the end, and then add an arbitrary letter to the end of the resulting word. For example, to translate the word "hill" into our secret language, take the first letter 'h' and move it to the end so that the word becomes "illh". Then, add any letter you want to the end of that. The intent of the last letter was to throw people off, leading them on into thinking the last letter was meaningful, when it really was just arbitrary, and it also meant that the same English word can be represented in at least 26 ways. To translate back into English, you...

Tie my handlebars to the stars so I stay on track, And if my intentions stray, I'll wrench them away, Then I'll take my leave, and I won't even look back. —Owl City, " Cave In ", 2009

Nervös. Bei dem Flughafen in New York war ich nervös. Es war meine erste Mal in Deutschland, und ich war einfach nervös. Dann habe ich die andere Amerikaner kennengelernt—es war auch die erste Mal in Deutschland für sie. Neun Stunden später war ich in der Stadt Nürnberg, und ich traf meine Gastfamilie bei dem Flughafen. Sie waren so freundlich, dass es so bequem war, Deutsch mit ihnen zu sprechen. Nach dem ersten Tag war ich nicht nochmal nervös. Ich konnte Deutschland einfach erfahren. Und Deutschland habe ich erfahren. Es gab viele Teile von andere Kulturen in der deutsche Kultur. Die beste Beispiel ist mein Gastbruder Urs. Er spielt wirklich amerikanischen Fußball (in Deutschland!). In Amerika benutzten wir in meine Deutschkurse „amerikanischen Fußball“, aber mein Gastbruder nennt dem Sport „American Football“—er benutzt Englisch! An dem erste Freitag hatte mein Gastbruder einen Tanzkurs, und dort hörten wir viele Lieder von Amerika. Jetzt muss jede Person in Deutschland Englisch ...

That surreal feeling when all of math you ever learned in school—from when you started counting on your fingers to when you integrated exponential functions—culminated in one final lecture and one beautiful proof. e iπ + 1 = 0

The overwhelming majority of my life thus far has been consumed by the primary and secondary education systems of the United States. Being so close to the end of high school, I often find it sobering to pause and look back on the whole journey. Nostalgic at times, longwinded at others, there isn't a singular direction I'm aiming for with these posts. When you get to the end, you might wonder what the point of the post was. When writing to this blog, I usually start with a main idea then let the post write itself. The idea for these posts is pure reflection. At the forefront, they're a collection of memories—kind of like a memoir. They're about me, and what makes me who I am. They're mostly for  me too. Perhaps years down the line, I'll look back at these posts and chuckle nostalgically at them. I'll call them School .

It started when I was 11. I was a fifth grader, or—as I had put it—a “senior” in elementary school. High school and college felt eons away, and middle school seemed merely an opportunity for renewed excitement. All of us were acutely aware that in middle school, there would be no recess, so we savored each day on the playground—each minute, each second. In the midst of this bustling playfulness, however, fear was lurking—a pervasive, subtle horror that guided the decision-making of nearly all children: the fear of being left out. It was amid this atmosphere when I started fencing. I suppose my path to fencing really started, then, before I was born. My parents are Chinese; they immigrated to the United States around four years before they had me. I often attempt to imagine what it might have been like for them. Everything that they knew—their people, their culture, their society, their language—all of it was gone. Truly, they must have felt alone, or perhaps left out. Yet somehow—an...

There is a fairly well-known concept called the " butterfly effect ". It's the idea that a small, seemingly minor change in the initial conditions of a system can ultimately result in a large, very major change later on. The general example is that if a random butterfly--in the perfect moment--flaps its wings, it could cause a chain of events which influences the time and path of a hurricane several weeks later. The mathematical study of this concept is in a realm known as " chaos theory ". I believe it was in ninth grade when my English class read one of Ray Bradbury's most ingenious and influential short stories, "A Sound of Thunder". The story is set in the year 2055, when it is said that time travel has been invented and perfected by humanity. The main character, Eckels, spends a great deal of money (namely $10,000) to go on a hunting expedition, but with an unusual twist: they want to hunt a Tyrannosaurus rex . As they travel backwards throu...

The other day in school, I overheard a conversation that intrigued me. A girl was bragging about how she stuck up her middle finger while walking through the hallway, and the teachers couldn't do anything about it. I didn't barge in to the conversation, but it got me thinking about why the girl thought she could make such a foul sign without consequence. In 1965, three kids wore black armbands to school in protest of the Vietnam War. The school imposed a policy banning the practice and calling for anyone violated the policy to be suspended until they complied. The kids argued that the school violated their First Amendment rights to free speech. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which, by a vote of 7-2, ruled in favor of the students. A popular excuse is the claim that she has "the right to free speech" in sticking up the middle finger. Firstly, what kind of "speech" is it trying to convey? To many, the sign is just like cursing. I mentione...