After Tahoe, came college / I HATE SCHOOL

PART FOUR

After Tahoe, came college. I was still very financially dependent on my parents, despite several attempts to work at various restaurants, medical centers. Maybe I should have just sold drugs. On one hand, i tried to take as wide range of a range of courses as i could, regardless of whether they’d count toward my majors(at first physics, then psychology) or not, including political science, classical mythology, positive psychology, shooting and developing holograms, decision making and judgement, dance, quantum mechanics etc. This directly resulted in me delaying graduation for another year. 

On one hand, I was very interested in the conceptual aspect of physics, on the other hand, I didn’t want to go to calculus classes at all. I did do well in quantum without understanding the Newtonian system too well though. I wonder if there will be a point in time in the future quantum’s all the physics we need to know. 

The point is, I was on probation for a total of maybe 2 years out of the five years I was in Ohio. I'd be on probation every other term, because being on two consecutively would result in withdrawal because my grades were lingering  in the 1.0 semester borderline. It was mostly due to all the partying, and drinking, and more partying… and more drinking. I say party, but more like… confused kids with bottled hormones are drowning in alcohol because the more law wants you to not drink until 21, the more you want to drink before 21.  I lived in a house, I had no choice but to participate since there were four Japanese and two Chinese, the other Chinese was always over at her chinese american boyfriend’s fraternity house. 

My physics grades were shit still despite trying hard the last two years of college  that I had one class that I couldn’t pass which directly resulted in me giving up the major completely. I settled with a minor. My other major, psychology, was doing ok despite bare minimal effort, though I always paid attention in class, I still didn’t want to do homework, or prepare for tests. I’ve never been good at tests. Or homework. Or anything I don’t like doing in general.

PART FIVE

I hate school. I like to learn. I like to read. I like to discuss, to interpret, to research, to profile characters and authors, to imagine what they must have felt against a certain historical backdrop at the time any of this information and perspective were given.  What was he thinking when he wrote this? What was she going through when she was heartbroken like that. I want to know. I don’t read fiction, I only read non-fiction. I don’t like authoritative narrative that sound like, this is how it was, how it went. I like to see personal stories, emotional perspectives, along with their collective memories that may or may not be closest to the truth.

Truth does not exist. Double-slit experiment tells us that everything exists in both a wave and a particle. It depends on when a wave is observed and it falls into one of its superpositions. I just read up on this on wikipedia real quick, and I believe even when it’s observed, there’s a possibility of its reversion. 

Since the state of everything changes depending on how it's observed, there’s little meaning in discussing what is ‘truth’, since there’s no ‘truth’ that exists alone. The philosophical debate of whether the subject truth exists alone is over, it does not. Nothing exists alone. It’s mutual, back-and-forth, entangled. Yes, everything is entangled. Quantum entanglement is in fact, how your iphone works. 

I hate school, because there’s no subjective truth. I hate school, because you can’t tell me I’m wrong, you are right. I hate school, because I’m not learning, I’m memorizing fake news. Math is not science. Physics is only an observation plus pattern recognition. What if there’s no pattern at all? What if all these narratives, false narratives, only exist in our brain plugged into matrix, our body soaked in wet water in a womb-like capsule since we haven’t taken the red pill?  

I thought by going to college in a different country, the nature of the educational system would be different. Turns out, it’s the same. I only truly enjoyed one year of going to school in my entire life, and that was South Tahoe High School, where I felt I was allowed to explore, investigate, experiment. College was not like that. It was back to the cramming information, and practice for skills like it’s a muscle, more like training, less like learning, or creating. 

I had a friend, who I used to be really close to, in fact, I was one of the first few people he came out to, whom I also no longer talk to. His name is Cameron. He also loved to read, and still loves to read. We’d always recommend books to each other, talk about art, culture, religion, language etc. 

PART SIX

Cameron inspired a lot of art in me. He’s a very creative person, and I still feel like how he lives right now is too precarious for me to think he knows how talented he is, and feel upset that he’s not pushing himself a bit harder to see how far he can get. Our relationship was purely platonic of course, since he’s gay, I’m pan, which actually means the affection was mostly one-sided, from me to him. 

He’s kind of like a cute little bird sometimes. Warm, happy. Other times, it's like thunderstorms, lightning strikes, that guy that’s been following you from across the street at 3am when you leave Smith Lab to do physics homework. Saying he’s moody would be an understatement of the century. He’s another emotional roller coaster, and for someone like me who couldn’t fix her mom, I took his confusing personality very seriously and suggested therapy. I doubt he ever had anything now that I see first-hand how having a few real mental illnesses can be. It’s not something you can decide when to have, when not to have. It comes and goes as it wants, leaving you like a wreckage like Miley Cyrus. Whatever he had, or pretended to have (sue me for defamation?), was definitely not serious enough to be on the amount of meds I’m on. But he was a very sad guy, for not being accepted by his Christian family for a long time for being gay. 

Gay or not did not matter to me. I liked being around him because he reminds me of someone from when I was very little. The kind of friend you’d share your favorite toy with, and just do silly things together without any purpose. He’s very gifted in so many things, language, art, culinary, and culture. My expectation for how fast people should pick up a language is not normal after meeting him. If you can’t speak like him, do you really know it? He was so good at imitation that, for a while, he kind of lost it. He was getting confused as to who he was and such, which was very confusing to me as well, because how do you not know who you are?

Later, I learned that it's like a strange thing he does to entertain himself, by pretending to be someone else. He even pretended to be a girl at one of our house parties and made out with three different guys, none of them knew he was a boy. I felt so sorry for them. Can’t wait to see how they are when they find out. Or have they found out already? I don’t know. 

The point is, he always knew who he was, we all know who we are. So here I am, telling you who I am. The good, the bad, the pretty, the ugly, just like a normal person. 

PART SEVEN

Because what is a normal person? I’m strongly against the idea that there is such a thing as the norm that people naturally approximate to. Sure, there are conventions, social etiquette, common interests, similarities. We are a naturally diverse species, we will be different, but to share the space on earth, certain ground rules to help us communicate and co-exist should be in place. 

Whether it being honorifics, or certain customs, traditions, preferences, ideas, beliefs, they could all be considered the norm. To say how someone as a person is normal does not make sense to me. Because how can you say what’s the norm, when such an exemplified normal does not exist in nature? There’s a range, and there’s an outlier. Both normal, both exist. 

All the people I’ve met throughout the years, in different countries, from different cultural backgrounds, religion, industries and I do get asked, how are they like? What do they like? My answer is always the same. You’d be the same, given the nurture. Or if you’d be completely different, given your nature. Or perhaps everything that would happen has already happened, and free will does not exist, either, that the nurture vs nature debate is pointless. Because neither dictates the outcome. 

I spent much time with various different student collectives, from class, from doing midterm together in Smith Lab, from performing, from the same dorm, from friends, etc. To me, they are all not too different.