actions, not words.

Today was a pretty decent day. I slept in this morning again by an extra thirty minutes after a dream in which I woke up and had overslept, which was an unfortunate dream since it resulted in me waking in a panicked mood and struggling to distinguish dream from reality. I headed to work and arrived reasonably close to on time—I worked briefly on some final externship tasks, attended standup, etc., and then ended up spending most of the rest of the day working on some side projects; being the final day, starting a new, significant task and leaving it half-finished seemed like a bad call. I spent some time editing my "Proud Corazón" arrangement and writing this blog post, and a lot of time watching the impeachment trial and checking the news. That was certainly a rollercoaster of a day, but sometimes that's how it goes. There were a few small non-graduation-type events which were nice sendoffs from the company—a team lunch, where I got to talk to some employees and exte...

Today was on the whole a decent day, although since I am now extremely tired and find it difficult to formulate sentences, my mood has deteriorated drastically, and I've reached a kind of emotionally agitated state that I would like to sleep off as soon as I can. I got up this morning at the horrific time of 5:30 AM, which was compounded by the fact that I had struggled to sleep consistently during the night as well. I ended up heading out after making myself a water bottle of tea and getting ready, and made it to the rental car place, from which we journeyed out around 6:30 AM, stopping back by Next to pick up a straggler. The drive there was mostly uneventful, as most people just slept instead of staying up to talk. We ended up arriving to New Haven just in time, and from there the nine round robin rounds began, with a break for lunch after the 6th round where we grabbed Korean-type fried chicken, which was really good, although most of us ended up having to take it out in a ...

This blog post is long, but writing it was a sort of exhale from a tense day, and I feel so much better having written it. Today was a good day. My anxiety levels were higher than usual today, which was unfortunate, but I think there were a variety of factors which resulted in this outcome. Part of it is, of course, that I don't have work to bury my emotions in, but there are other evident ones, which include my distaste for any form of human conflict, however necessary, although the specific incident I will not discuss here. In any case, I spent a lot  of time with friends, and this was exceptionally nice, even if I didn't get much work done. I woke up this morning at around 5:20 and struggled to get back to sleep for about half-an-hour or more. I woke up again somewhere around 7:50, but decided that I did not possess the willpower to actually get up, which resulted in me eventually getting up around 9:40. I got ready, ate a very little amount, and then headed over to MacG...

and the sun sets on another year... Context, or Motivation Last year’s version of this document can be found here: https://www.alanzhu.me/2019/01/2018-year-in-review.html This document has been produced every year since 2016; that is, I have been writing this every year since the end of freshman year of high school up to the beginning of freshman year of college. This year, it also comes at the end of the decade, the first full decade I have lived through, [2010, 2020). This is kind of miraculous in a weird sort of way. As it has been described at the beginning of every post so far: “This is mostly a document for me to look back on and read in a couple of years or something, so I’ll have some memory of what I actually did in my high school years, though this is probably focusing on detail that will seem unimportant in a few years.” Perhaps another quote that demonstrates why this tradition is so important to me is this: “Personal growth isn't a state function. The ...