actions, not words.

The title of this blog post comes from  a really cute song  that one of my friends sent me and which I've been listening to on repeat for probably an hour now. Reminder that most daily posts are not getting published here—instead, they are on a staging blog that will be shared upon request—and that most posts will be edited down in the future to their core content. Today was a great day. In regards to how productive I was, or how today sets me up for the coming few days, a different discussion can and probably should be had. However, I think I made a resolution at some point going into MIT that I was never going to regret not doing problem sets and not sleeping because I was spending time with friends, and I think today has to fall under that exemption. Never regret the good things—they are the only things you have. This doesn't stop you from exercising some time management skills, or planning for the future, but I strongly believe that this is a valuable part of one's life...

tl;dr: this blog is going to be condensed down to only "quality" writing starting May 7th; daily minutia will continue to be published at a staging blog—contact me for details. My mood has been kind of wobbly recently, and I'm not entirely sure why. There have been days where the writing has kind of come naturally to me and my mind is full of ideas, and other days where the writing is dull and repetitive, full of echoes of things already said. This strange emotional variability can also be seen from some of the data I keep from this blog, so I'm not just imagining it—my mood has been more consistently variable over the past few weeks, if one can forgive the oxymoronic phrase of "consistently variable." In regards to writing, I plan on significantly changing the form factor of this blog in the coming few weeks—I do think that having this daily writing has benefited me by giving a space to unravel my thoughts, but I don't think this is useful as a publ...

I don't like the fact that I'm taking extra time out of my day to write this. I expect this post to be a long ramble through a series of thoughts which have been sort of chaotically swirling around my head recently, and although it's possible that observing them and writing them down will collapse them, like a wavefunction, I don't really think it's likely. I also don't like the fact that writing this feels like a waste of time. I'm writing this down to work through how I feel—that seems have some inherent value, beyond anything acquiring some additional points on a problem set or a final project could create. Besides, I'm going to pass these classes no matter what, right? Right? If I'm not doing this for myself, then what am I doing it for? If I'm not writing this for myself, then what am I doing it for? Some abstract audience? If I'm not taking these classes for myself, then what am I doing it for? A 'P' somewhere on a transc...

Today was a pretty okay day. I am not satisfied with the extent to which I am caught up, but I see no choice but to sleep now in preparation for an actual school day tomorrow. So I will write, I suppose, as a way of trying to prepare myself for a full night's sleep tonight. In the past—i.e. in high school—I used to write about the "post-debate blues." These were the feelings that followed the hectic tournaments that characterized my every weekend; after round after round of speaking and walking around high schools and a long bus ride, I would sit down on Sunday, tired out of my mind, all the adrenaline crashed out of my system, a laundry list of homework in front of me, and I would just be sad and lack all motivation to do anything. I would miss the tournament; miss my friends, miss my escape, but the overall pervasive feeling of sadness seemed to emanate from somewhere else deep inside me, a source which I never really succeeded in pinning down. This is the first tim...

Today was a decent day. I am much more on my feet than I thought I might be, but I still feel like I'm juggling so much that at any moment a task might slip out of my fingers and, while I'm not looking, fly out of reach and land on the floor, uncompleted, unsatisfied. Of course, the importance of dropping something varies drastically with the given task, but that doesn't mean I'm not concerned. The mild anxiety that keeps me on edge sometimes feels like the engine that keeps me going and allows me to do as much as I do, but other times when it's a little more zealous than usual, it begins eating up my mental state from the inside. It's something like the hydrochloric acid in your stomach—it's generally very useful and it's an inherent part of you, but if the mucus lining fails to protect you at any point, you're just toast, and it'll rot you from the inside. Gruesome analogy aside, I did manage to accomplish quite a bit. I woke up with my alarm...

Earlier tonight, I think I believed today had been a pretty decent day. Once again, it seems to me that being awake late and spending time thinking has ruined my emotional state. This time, however, it seems that the thoughts are running in a direction I don't quite understand, and with no one else on this road with me, I stumble out into the dark. For the first time in a while, thoughts first, events later. I think the title of this blog has long since been overdue for a change. This new one originates, at least for me, from a description of Chinese culture found on the Wikipedia page for the short film Bao . (This specific aspect of Bao  is briefly mentioned here  and the first mention of the film appears here .) I think it's a good general life philosophy—to do things that actually matter to people, rather than just talk about them. I don't mean that we need to stop talking about problems, but rather that we ought to do things about them (sometimes, the talking is the ...

"The struggle is real , " Pei-Ken Hung, Real Analysis Instructor. Today was a mediocre day. I really don't want to write too much about it, but I'm inevitably going to do so. It's unfortunate that I do feel my writing facilities slipping away as I get more and more tired, especially since I'm still only functioning on 3.5 hours of sleep, but what must be said must be said. I got up this morning and headed to Real Analysis lecture with very little sleep. The whole endeavor was somewhat rough; I overslept the alarm, dashed to class with a friend, sat through the first 30 minutes of the lecture until sharp abdominal pain forced me to leave briefly before returning for the rest of the class. Our focus was on functions and the Intermediate Value/Extreme Value Theorems, and the class was markedly more empty than usual. I struggled to focus, sleep barely leaving me. The fire alarm went off at the end, marking a fitting end to our last in-person lecture. Spanish...

Liminal . This is a word that my writing professor has been using to describe states of being in which it is good to start a story because it's something in-between. A transitional state, a threshold, one full of uncertainty, an apt environment for both hope and despair. All of MIT has been stuck in this liminal state for what feels like ages now. I legitimately could not tell you when the first email about coronavirus was sent—it could've been a day ago, it could've been two weeks ago. It is such a strange and draining state, and nothing normal can occur. I have no idea why I am up at this time on one of the days I'm supposed to sleep at 12:30 AM, but it's also the last day of its type for the semester. Everything is a last of some sort, in a way. Last Maseeh lunch of the semester. Last 'it's Wednesday, my dudes' email of the semester. Last everything of the semester, and of my first year on campus. It feels so much like everybody is trying to wrap ...

Unlike yesterday's assumption, today was categorically not fine, and, in fact, extremely bad. I've been on the verge of a gradual slide into a mental breakdown since 9:30 AM or so this morning, and it's only gotten worse since. I am extremely tired and I still have another two days of classes to make it through. To be perfectly honest, I'm not entirely sure how I'll survive tomorrow. I'll do it because I have to, but I certainly won't be happy about it. I got up this morning, ready for a perfectly fine morning after a pretty abysmal night's of sleep and having delayed my alarm through my breakfast time. I headed out at a pretty blistering pace to get to Real Analysis, where today our main points of discussion were about continuity and our continued discussion of the properties of the power series for the exponential function. It was not particularly efficient, but that didn't really matter because I was also pretty distracted throughout the lecture...

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 ...