blog.
Hello!
Welcome to the new blog. In the coming weeks, I’ll be porting over old posts. This process will likely be painstaking, but will allow me to also review some of my work and likely make some cuts and edits. In the meantime, all the old posts will stay up at the blogspot link.
What do you mean by “old posts?”
Since August of 2018, I have written a blog post every day without fail for over 1000 days. I used to publish these blog posts publicly; I have since moved them to a private blog, but I have kept up some pieces of writing I stand by and occasionally posted new ones. This site contains an archive of those posts, along with blog posts I write on other platforms, such as for MIT Admissions.
The RSS feed for this site is here. An archive organized by month can be found here.
-
1214A — "eighteen-period-o-three"
a post about a very busy day
Today was a pretty good day. It was full and it was busy, but it was not the kind of busy where you get nothing useful done and you feel horrible at the end of the day; it was more gentle, with various breaks, where you get to wrap up threads that have been open for quite some time and move on with your life. It was nice.
-
长大
on family, thanksgiving, and growing up
Growing up, Thanksgiving was an extremely important holiday for my family. Every year, my mom and dad would invite all the Chinese faculty and graduate students from the local university to our house for a Thanksgiving meal. It was a way of giving the graduate students, many of whom had all of their relatives in China, a way to share the holiday with other people. We would fill all the rooms in the house, and everybody would eat together.
-
lord, it is time for a blog post
the huge semester has gone halfway by
The last time I posted was over two months ago. I wrote then that I was “so, so tired,” even though classes had just started. And then I disappeared into the battlefield of the semester, not to be heard from again. What happened?
After suffering immensely during an extremely overloaded sophomore fall, I had told myself that I would never subject myself to anything like it again.
-
1150A — fuck. (reprise)
a post from a particularly bad day
The more things change, the more they stay the same—or, I suppose, that is the claim that is oft-made about the way the world works. I am not so sure I believe this to be true, in the general sense; I think I have found that, as time has gone on, I have grown significantly, and life truly has gotten better for me, since those formative days in high school where I first came to terms with the fact that not everyone had the same darkness in their hearts... -
[joint post] the MIT picture scavenger hunt
or, how to drive yourself insane by looking at floorplans
joint post written with CJ
CJ: Gods, how did this start again?
Alan: Are we really doing another conversational-style joint post?
CJ: There’s literally no other way we know how to write a joint post.