This World and Me

Song of the Week #3 is actually a combination of two tracks called "Desiderium 207" and "Mirage", both by Armin van Buuren . This is the third part of a weekly series of posts: check out my very first one for more details. The reason I am presenting them together is because they were made to go together; "Desiderium 207" is the first track on Armin van Buuren's 2010 album Mirage , and "Mirage" is the second. The two tracks flow directly into one another. Whenever I need to refer to the two tracks together by name, I will simply use "Mirage". To explain, nowadays, albums usually consist of tracks, each of which can stand on their own. As I understand it, this has been influenced heavily by the advent of digital download as a medium through which consumers may obtain music. With digital download, people can choose specific songs on albums to download on their own, and in programs like iTunes, you can choose specific tracks on alb...

Almost all of the heavy elements that exist in nature – carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, calcium, etc. – were originally formed as a result of nuclear reactions within the core of dying stars. This is one of the only locations in the universe we know of that is capable of producing these elements naturally. You are made of all of these elements. The material that constitutes your body was formed in the core of a star a long time ago. The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star stuff. —Carl Sagan, Cosmos Look up at the night sky. See those little pinpricks of light? Who knows whether, at the end of the star's life, the elements it formed will eventually come together to form new life?

Song of the Week #2 is "Das kann uns keiner nehmen" by Revolverheld . This is the second part of a weekly series of posts that I have started doing: see my post last week for more information about it. "Das kann uns keiner nehmen" is sung in German. The title means "no one can take that from us", and it is the second song off Revolverheld's 2013 album Immer in Bewegung  (German for Always in Motion ). I've been learning the German language for about 4 years now—since my freshman year of high school and still now in my freshman year of college. It was actually my graduate student instructor (GSI) in my first semester at UC Berkeley who introduced me to this song. Almost every day, she would play a German song for us as we prepared for class. We could even suggest songs for her to play. As I was unpacking my notebook and pencils from my backpack before class, she began to play "Das kann uns keiner nehmen". I was not listening closely e...

Today, I'd like to try something new. I haven't been posting as often to this blog this year as I did in 2016. Much of this is due to a lack of creative energy. There are several draft posts that I've started, but I either don't know how to go about finishing them or don't feel motivated enough to do so. Some of the topics I have spent the last few months drafting are challenging to write about. For example, there's a draft about goodbyes that touches upon various goodbyes I've had to experience throughout my life and how they've shaped me, and there's also a draft I've procrastinated on for almost a year now about my thoughts on the competitiveness of the music industry, and there's another one about the similarities between Shakespearean comedy and a modern animated film series. As I've drafted these posts, I found myself frustrated by my inability to articulate precisely what I feel, which perhaps stems from an underlying uncertainty a...

Prince. Why, thou owest God a death. [Exit Prince.] Falstaff. 'Tis not due yet: I would be loath to pay him before his day. What need I be so forward with him that calls not on me? Well, 'tis no matter; honor pricks me on. Yea, but how if honor prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honor set to a leg?  No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honor hath no skill in surgery then? No. What is honor? A word. What is in that word honor? What is that honor? Air—a trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died a Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. 'Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I'll none of it. Honor is a mere scutcheon—and so ends my catechism. Exit. —William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1    (1597), Act 5, Scene 1. An attack on the value of "honor" to those who fight to the death. A soliloquy by the cowardly Sir John Falstaff at t...

I recorded an eruption of the Grand Geyser at Yellowstone National Park on July 11, 2017. This geyser, according to a sign just by the geyser, is the world's tallest predictable geyser, and the eruption I recorded here lasted 13 minutes. Although it is predictable, the prediction is only precise to a 3-hour time window. When my sister and I arrived, it was almost 8 pm, and the geyser was predicted to erupt between 8 pm and 11 pm. We waited 40 minutes. The whole time, the sky was cloudy and the atmosphere was rather gloomy. Suddenly, after we had been sitting there chatting for a while, the clouds parted, revealing a gorgeous stream of golden sunlight. And right then, as if someone knew, the geyser erupted. Here it is on video.

You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you. —Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft , 2000 This post is dedicated to my Ideal Reader. :)

O'Brien smiled faintly. 'You are no metaphysician, Winston,' he said. 'Until this moment you had never considered what is meant by existence. I will put it more precisely. Does the past exist concretely, in space? Is there somewhere or other a place, a world of solid objects, where the past is happening? 'No.' 'Then where does the past exist, if at all?' 'In records. It is written down.' 'In records. And — ?" 'In the mind. In human memories.' 'In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?' 'But how can you stop people from remembering things?' cried Winston, again momentarily forgetting the dial. 'It is involuntary. It is outside oneself. How can you control memory? You have not controlled mine!' O'Brien's manner grew stern again. He laid his hand on the dial. 'On the contrary,' he said, ...

Anyone who knows me well knows that my favorite musician is Adam Young, the guy who created Owl City. What a lot of people don't know is that Adam Young has created several other projects in addition to Owl City. Whereas the Owl City project creates most of its music with electronic beats and melodies, Young's Sky Sailing project uses more acoustic instrumentation, and Young's eponymous "film score" project  draws inspiration from many varieties of soundtrack from orchestral to a cool country acoustic to lightweight electronic. Port Blue is an ambient music project that involves elements of both acoustic and electronic instrumentation with a quasi-film score feel. I love it. After Owl City released its fourth studio album, The Midsummer Station  (2012), the project saw an immense musical hiatus spanning several years. In the entire year of 2013, the only real Owl City music released was contained within  The Midsummer Station Acoustic EP  (2013), which had acou...

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. — C. S. Lewis , Mere Christianity , 1952

"Shelter" is the first and only collaboration between American electronic music producer Porter Robinson and French electronic music producer Hugo "Madeon" Leclercq , released in August 2016. You may be familiar with the spectacular anime music video for the song; in this post, I will focus primarily on my interpretation of the song independent of the music video, as I believe that the song has a different, though fundamentally similar, story to the music video. The song begins with an infectious, uplifting hook: " ayy I-will ayy, ayy I-will ahh " – chopped-up vocals of Amy Millan, left over from when Millan collaborated with Robinson on his 2014 album Worlds . As its name suggests, the defining theme of Worlds is fiction and fictional worlds. Each song in Worlds teleports the listener into a different world that Robinson has created. The exact details of each world are, of course, left for the listener to interpret , but the broad strokes that Robin...

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

When I was in sixth grade, I received an email from a classmate. The message was bizarre. It was one of those kinds of emails that claimed to be magical. For instance, if you were to forward this email to 15 of your contacts, the email claims that you will be successful in life or that a puppy will be saved. Some of these emails were downright threatening, claiming to be "cursed" and that if you did not forward the email within a specific time frame, you will be hurt. There was no point in calling the police; in most cases, the sender was a fellow classmate or a friend that clearly had no interest in hurting you. Ultimately, I'd like to believe that even kids could see through the veil and understand that the messages were fake. So why do kids still ritually forward these messages? Because it's fun, I suppose. It doesn't feel like there's any harm involved in just forwarding an email to a friend that you know well – besides, there's the remote  chance that...

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. —Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked , 1935

I grew up in Dublin, Ohio, a suburb northwest of Columbus. My school district offers me numerous opportunities that are not offered to students everywhere. In high school, I had the opportunity to take AP Chemistry—a college-level course—as a freshman. I got to take courses in the German language all four years of high school—I even visited Germany in the summer of 2016 to study with a host family. By my junior year’s end, I had taken a total of eight AP exams, and my senior year of high school has so far been spent at The Ohio State University under Ohio’s “College Credit Plus” dual-enrollment program. While these experiences have undoubtedly been illuminating, at the same time, they have isolated me from certain critical perspectives on our daily lives. I had my world turned on its head in the summer of 2015. In school, I had learned a little bit on the importance of community service, and I thought it would be healthy to leave Dublin and experience a different environment. With th...

"Rey. May the Force be with you." —General Leia Organa, portrayed by Carrie Fisher (1956–2016), the last lines of dialogue of Star Wars: The Force Awakens , 2015

"... you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life." —Steve Jobs, Stanford commencement address , 2005

Consider the following. Before you stands a heap of sand. You have just returned home from the beach, and while there, you grabbed a bunch of sand, placed it in a jar, took it home, and dumped it onto the floor. These individual grains of sand are collectively a heap . We can both agree to this as “heap” is a rather vague description for a mound or pile of a particular substance. Now, there are probably hundreds upon hundreds of grains of sand in this heap. Let’s suppose there are exactly 10,000 grains. If we take exactly one grain of sand out of the heap, we would then have 9,999 grains of sand, and we would both still agree that 9,999 grains of sand is a heap. Likewise, if we remove another grain of sand, we are left with 9,998 grains, and it would still be a heap. Removing one grain of sand is so trivial a difference that it does not change whether the remaining grains are a heap. You might already see a potential problem with this argument. If we accept the premise that removing o...

Oh, cut my lace in sunder that my pent heart May have some scope to beat, or else I swoon With this dead-killing news. —William Shakespeare, Richard III , 1592 (comments by Queen Elizabeth, upon learning that Richard, the corrupt Duke of Gloucester, will be crowned King of England)

To my friends who read the blog, Firstly, thank you. I have received numerous compliments from all of you regarding the content on this blog, and I have found myself deeply encouraged by your kindness and appreciation. 2016 has seen so far more than  fifty  individual posts. In the preceding year, I only posted ten times, and the year before that had only eight updates from me. Some of these posts are quick, little snippets – such as quotes that I found particularly clever or appealing – some of these posts are lengthy dissections of an abstract concept, and some of these posts are comprehensive introspections on aspects of my own life. The empty text box is such a gorgeous sight to me. In many ways, I am my first reader. It's exciting to experience the whole process, starting with an initial idea – I call it a "seed" – and seeing it essentially write itself. I'm just the lowly photographer, watching it all happen from behind a camera. The ideas in each post inter...

"Years of love have been forgot In the hatred of a minute—" —Edgar Allan Poe, "To —" , circa 1829

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. —Steve Jobs, Stanford commencement address , 2005

When I was in first grade, one of my classmates invited me to try out gymnastics. I didn't really know what gymnastics was, but I got an idea when my friend described the legendary "cheese pit", a deep pit of hundreds of soft, foam, "cheese"-like blocks. Gymnastics seemed like a huge playground for kids. The introductory class was just me, my friend, and two other kids. It was my first day, but the other kids had already been gymnasts for several weeks (a week feels longer to a seven-year-old), so I was more on my own. We started with a few basic warm-up stretches (not the cheese pit), and then we did a workout on the trampoline (also not the cheese pit). Towards the end of the workout, we made our way to one of those large gymnastic wedge mats. I was stunned. I could not remember seeing such a strange-looking mat before in all of my seven years of existence. I blurted out: "What the hell is that!?" This post flows naturally from a string of posts ...

Consider this scenario. The instructor of one of your classes promises you that there will be a surprise quiz next week. The class in question meets only on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and a "surprise" quiz is one which, walking into the classroom, you have no idea whether it will be given on that day. The school week ends on Friday, so there are only three possible dates for the quiz: next Monday, next Wednesday, and next Friday. If you came to class on both Monday and Wednesday, and on both days, there were no quizzes, then you would know, walking into class on Friday, that there must be a quiz, for Friday is the last remaining day in which the instructor could give a quiz as promised that week.  Therefore, it would not be a surprise for the instructor to give a quiz on Friday. Because Friday has now been eliminated, Monday and Wednesday are the only possibilities left for the surprise quiz. If you came to class on Monday and were not given a quiz, then Wednesday...

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 ...