今天下午在实验室看到facebook上一条新闻。刚开始只是感觉有些意外，然后心里稍稍高兴了一下，告知几个好友，说我今晚要把新买的Beaujolais红酒开封畅饮。回到家了，看看冰箱里储存的红酒，想想还是没喝。
坐下来后，感觉又回来了。跟康奈尔的“老大姐”聊了几句，她叫我设想一下如果自己还在美国Ithaca，那么今天的生活完全就是另一个样子。白天上课，晚上学习，有空出去见见朋友，到处跑跑。而且，那样的话如果熬到今天就不会是孤身一人了。有些事情明摆着的，自己迷在局中才看不见。我原先就说有些事情不会长久，果然被我说中了。可惜老天总是给人玩一个时间差的游戏。也许是年龄还小涉世未深，对于生活的点点滴滴没有经验，就像是给个孩童一只整鸡，尽管饿极，这个鸡还是大得让他不知从何处下手。有人天生就会吃鸡，有人后天摸索出来吃鸡的方法，还有人是从别人那里学来的。如果这个孩子的父母一直把鸡撕开给他鸡腿，那么恐怕这小孩长大后都不知道鸡是何物。饥荒的时候即时抓到了一只鸡也不知道如何把其变成盘中餐。这人很可能守着食物而仍然饿死。想想至今所有错失的良机，也只能继续走下去了。毕竟生活的脚步是不会停下来等你的。
今天要申请奖学金，与SKS开会商讨这个学期的活动，又是忙碌的一天。
tisdag 21 september 2010
söndag 12 september 2010
Thriving like a cockroach
Saturday night was Uppsala cultural night, an annual event hosted by all the activity clubs in town.
I went out with some friends. We took a drink at Upplands Nation, we went to an improvisational salsa lesson, and hanged out with some exchange students for a while. I was the one who brought groups of people together, and it was fun.
All of the guys who went with me to the salsa lesson thought it was an excellent idea. To them it meant getting intimate physical contact with scores of beautiful girls with hardly any effort. To me it wasn’t anything new. After all, it seemed like a smart idea to attend that dance lesson that night. Luckily the jousting show wasn’t as long as I thought would be. So I could make some positive adjustments to my plan. After the salsa lesson, we checked out over a hundred people dancing in circles on the square in front of the train station. A girl in our group suggested we should join the circle. So I ran over there with her. Then a funny thing happened: it took us like two minutes before we realized the dancers were all Iraqis, except us two Asians. We crashed the gathering of a local Iraqi community. But we were high, we were excited and in that moment, nothing in the world could stop us. We danced for a while before going back to our friends, who were still shaking their heads in disbelief of our little adventure.
Enough report on cultural night, let’s get down to my epiphany.
Mr. Hu the president of CSSAU once said to the graduate freshmen, that one ought to live like a cockroach in order to get used to the Uppsala student life. Roaches are die-hard creatures. You stomp on them a hundred times, they can still get up and crawl away flattened. They recover miraculously fast. To all the SC2 nerds out there, you know what I’m talking about. Just to make it clear, I deal with computer games only in past tense. Roaches even live through atomic blast. When all other sophisticated life forms perished in the nuclear winter, roaches remain, ready to dominate the earth and direct a new round of evolution in its own image.
Roaches are tough. So should men. Remember the Asian Playboy article I posted? A pickup artist should have thousands of approaches, with the number of rejections in the same order of magnitude as the approaches. Only then can they achieve their goal. In the seduction community, there is a saying that the best PUAs have had more failures than the average men. An average frustrated chump have never tried, thus, his statistics could potentially look better, because his number of rejections are zero. In the end, no matter how many battles you fight, you will only be remembered for the ones you win, and not the ones you lose.
Well, I’m not here to talk about seduction community. Getting rejected in clubs is nothing compared to those rejections for life. One of my friends at Cornell went on probation for failing numerous classes in one semester. He wasn’t dumb or lazy. That time, he took on too many projects and was way over his head. He spent half a year studying at home, fixing credits from summer school, and finally returned to Ivy League. In my opinion, he will accomplish great deeds, simply because he recovered from such a blow and learned his lesson. For someone who has always been successful, he/she won’t possess this potential. Well, if the winning streak never ends, then luck can be seen as ability. However, once the walls fall around you, some people just won’t walk around with the same confident stature as before.
It’s not about never failing, it’s the recovery. To realists, “failures” occur when things don’t go your way. They are bound to happen. You just have to live through them. Remember Mystery once brought a fake cigar to bars and night clubs. It was just another prop he wanted to try. Unfortunately, within minutes of conversation, his targets could always realize the cigar wasn’t real. They asked him why he brought a fake cigar when going out. The first time it happened, he didn’t have any good answer. He was like “uh, I don’t know…” Whenever somebody looked through his trick and confronted him about it, it was like catching a pig in a bag. No thrill, just slaughter. However, Mystery came up with an excellent way to recover from his blown cover.
He said: smoking disgusts me. Then he would puff the cigar as if it was real. This line made a humorous turn and his status was reinstated.
In real life, you don’t always find a fast and easy recovery as Mystery did. But you have to recover anyway. When Boston Celtics were facing off the Kobe-led Lakers, their head coach told the Celtics: Kobe will always score. He’ll score no matter how far away the hoop is, he’ll score with your hands in his face, and he’ll score with you performing a perfect block on his shot. You just have to take Kobe’s hits and hit back harder. In that game, Kobe scored a game-high 38 points. However, the Lakers lost with almost 20 points. It’s your right to get whatever you want, but it’s the right of the universe to grant you failures. Countering failure is like stopping Kobe Bryant from winning a game. They’ll always hit you, and sometimes hurt you. Just stand up like those hits weren’t real, and try again.
I went out with some friends. We took a drink at Upplands Nation, we went to an improvisational salsa lesson, and hanged out with some exchange students for a while. I was the one who brought groups of people together, and it was fun.
All of the guys who went with me to the salsa lesson thought it was an excellent idea. To them it meant getting intimate physical contact with scores of beautiful girls with hardly any effort. To me it wasn’t anything new. After all, it seemed like a smart idea to attend that dance lesson that night. Luckily the jousting show wasn’t as long as I thought would be. So I could make some positive adjustments to my plan. After the salsa lesson, we checked out over a hundred people dancing in circles on the square in front of the train station. A girl in our group suggested we should join the circle. So I ran over there with her. Then a funny thing happened: it took us like two minutes before we realized the dancers were all Iraqis, except us two Asians. We crashed the gathering of a local Iraqi community. But we were high, we were excited and in that moment, nothing in the world could stop us. We danced for a while before going back to our friends, who were still shaking their heads in disbelief of our little adventure.
Enough report on cultural night, let’s get down to my epiphany.
Mr. Hu the president of CSSAU once said to the graduate freshmen, that one ought to live like a cockroach in order to get used to the Uppsala student life. Roaches are die-hard creatures. You stomp on them a hundred times, they can still get up and crawl away flattened. They recover miraculously fast. To all the SC2 nerds out there, you know what I’m talking about. Just to make it clear, I deal with computer games only in past tense. Roaches even live through atomic blast. When all other sophisticated life forms perished in the nuclear winter, roaches remain, ready to dominate the earth and direct a new round of evolution in its own image.
Roaches are tough. So should men. Remember the Asian Playboy article I posted? A pickup artist should have thousands of approaches, with the number of rejections in the same order of magnitude as the approaches. Only then can they achieve their goal. In the seduction community, there is a saying that the best PUAs have had more failures than the average men. An average frustrated chump have never tried, thus, his statistics could potentially look better, because his number of rejections are zero. In the end, no matter how many battles you fight, you will only be remembered for the ones you win, and not the ones you lose.
Well, I’m not here to talk about seduction community. Getting rejected in clubs is nothing compared to those rejections for life. One of my friends at Cornell went on probation for failing numerous classes in one semester. He wasn’t dumb or lazy. That time, he took on too many projects and was way over his head. He spent half a year studying at home, fixing credits from summer school, and finally returned to Ivy League. In my opinion, he will accomplish great deeds, simply because he recovered from such a blow and learned his lesson. For someone who has always been successful, he/she won’t possess this potential. Well, if the winning streak never ends, then luck can be seen as ability. However, once the walls fall around you, some people just won’t walk around with the same confident stature as before.
It’s not about never failing, it’s the recovery. To realists, “failures” occur when things don’t go your way. They are bound to happen. You just have to live through them. Remember Mystery once brought a fake cigar to bars and night clubs. It was just another prop he wanted to try. Unfortunately, within minutes of conversation, his targets could always realize the cigar wasn’t real. They asked him why he brought a fake cigar when going out. The first time it happened, he didn’t have any good answer. He was like “uh, I don’t know…” Whenever somebody looked through his trick and confronted him about it, it was like catching a pig in a bag. No thrill, just slaughter. However, Mystery came up with an excellent way to recover from his blown cover.
He said: smoking disgusts me. Then he would puff the cigar as if it was real. This line made a humorous turn and his status was reinstated.
In real life, you don’t always find a fast and easy recovery as Mystery did. But you have to recover anyway. When Boston Celtics were facing off the Kobe-led Lakers, their head coach told the Celtics: Kobe will always score. He’ll score no matter how far away the hoop is, he’ll score with your hands in his face, and he’ll score with you performing a perfect block on his shot. You just have to take Kobe’s hits and hit back harder. In that game, Kobe scored a game-high 38 points. However, the Lakers lost with almost 20 points. It’s your right to get whatever you want, but it’s the right of the universe to grant you failures. Countering failure is like stopping Kobe Bryant from winning a game. They’ll always hit you, and sometimes hurt you. Just stand up like those hits weren’t real, and try again.
fredag 3 september 2010
Nothing goes according to plan
A brand new semester, back in Uppsala. New friends, new faces and new allegiances. Also, a new set of plan of my last academic years. At one instance, it seemed like everything is fitting into a perfectly knitted grand scheme of things to come.
Only if the things went according to my plan.
Scenario one: finding a housing in Uppsala this year is difficult beyond belief. The youngsters born in the 1990s have graduated from high school. Due to the worldwide recession, those folks who didn't choose academia, ended up jobless. This year is the time when everyone turned their eyes from the depleted job opportunities to higher education. The university officials, incompetent as they are, admitted more students than what the local housing options can possibly accommodate. Also being the last tuition-free year for master students coming from outside EU, the influx of international graduate students is at a historic high. With my 1700 days in the line at a major housing company, I only got an apartment after three rounds of selection. The move-in was set at September 1st, two days since the semester start. During my first ten days in Uppsala, I lived at a friend's place. He was kind enough to let me sleep on a comfortable mattress in his living room. This guy and me, we were in the same class since freshman year. Now he's doing his master thesis. It's like living a life connected by three dots: BMC, the institute where he works; home; the ICA store where he purchases grocery. Life is boring and it sucks.
Scenario two: most of the people I knew since earlier are either taking a year off, or working on master thesis. There are few familiar faces in my classes. My social circle in Uppsala is facing a decline. My friend Anna with astonishing prowess in Chinese, went to China; Sven the nice dude from Chemical Engineering chose one year in Shanghai after losing a student board election; A clique of girls in my major either transferred to Gothenborg or remain in Adelaide on exchange. Other than my friends who departed, more are on their way to leave the town. Mohammad my IBO-alumnus is going to Chicago for his master thesis in a few months. Without the company of my closest friends, I'm yet again a new guy in town.
Scenario three: I finally moved into my new apartment. It seems like the previous patron from either India, Pakistan or Bangladesh abused the condo badly (his name was still on the mailbox). The wallpapers are completely greased. The doors are full of dents. The funniest part is, he even removed the light bulbs from the kitchen, the bathroom, and the closet. Something you definitely shouldn't do in a Swedish apartment for rent. This apartment came unfurnitured. The first few weeks in school are totally wasted on buying furnitures and making my home look good. Whenever I'm cooking or just hanging around, I keep finding new traces of past abuse. I don't wanna act like a racist. Though I strongly encourage people to not live into their own stereotype, giving the true racists reasons to justify their actions.
Scenario four: One of my best friend is supposed to write his bachelor thesis in Economics. However, due to a misunderstanding between him and his faculty advisor, he failed to register the thesis-writing as a course. This semester, he got no course registered. Which in turn meant no study aid from CSN, the Swedish Board of Study Aid. Initially we were supposed to share the apartment together with a third patron from China. Since he got no money, he had to back out. To fund his living, my troubled friend must find a job. I can't blame him, although I sincerely hope this transpiration won't disturb our perfectly maintained friendship. I'm sharing the apartment with two Chinese graduate students now.
Scenario five: it's gonna take longer before I can graduate. If I insist on having my master thesis in US, I must wait. Mohammad is going to Chicago in January, and he was accepted as early as in May. Two people from my major started their own iGEM team. Both of them got projects to work on stateside. They were admitted when I was still in Cornell and they are going in January as well. The lapse of at least one semester is required from the point one gets admitted til the actual visit. I realized when I was indulging myself with the Cornell experience, my Swedish classmates weren't sitting around doing nothing either. Since they stayed for a prolonged time in Uppsala and obtained experience within the local research sector, they gained an upper hand. Even with the valuable trainings Cornell offered, I ended up "in their game". For example, the iGEM folks would never peer into iGEM if they went abroad. They wouldn't know enough people in Uppsala to build a team and get financial support. In some sense, it's better to stay at one institute than moving around. It's good to get new experiences, but if you want to accomplish something, sometimes you have to settle down and let time fullfil its promises. I have no clue of what's gonna happen to me next semester. It would suck so much if I can't make it to USA before summer. I'll become a super-uber-senior who takes too long to graduate. Besides, I won't even have those friends with master thesis around me anymore. They'll be graduating in spring and leave the town.
Even with a few difficulties in my social as well as academic life, there are a few things I haven't lost my grip on. I'm mostly interested in synthetic biology. Unfortunately Uppsala has no research program or courses offered in the field. I want to find a lab in US working on it. To prepare myself, I signed up for a literature project course. You are to read articles on a given subject and submit a review. I chose synthetic biology. I want to read up on the subject so I will know for sure what I'm gonna work on. Also, it's a chance for me to prove myself for my future lab supervisor that I know a great deal about synthetic biology even without having worked in a synethic biology lab. My friend who offered me housing earlier suggested since Uppsala has no synthetic biology, I can perhaps bring it here. After working and gaining enough experience from my future research abroad, I should try to lead my own synthetic biolog team in Uppsala and become a professor. When that day comes, I must hire a bunch of good-looking babes as my students, and put my friend right in the middle of all those wonderful creatures. "By then, you can finally repay my favor!" He gave out a laughter.
Tomorrow is a big day. My parents are coming to help me furnish my room. After that it's an important meeting. I still love US much more than Sweden. Hopefully I'm going to see the "land of freedom" again in the near future.
Only if the things went according to my plan.
Scenario one: finding a housing in Uppsala this year is difficult beyond belief. The youngsters born in the 1990s have graduated from high school. Due to the worldwide recession, those folks who didn't choose academia, ended up jobless. This year is the time when everyone turned their eyes from the depleted job opportunities to higher education. The university officials, incompetent as they are, admitted more students than what the local housing options can possibly accommodate. Also being the last tuition-free year for master students coming from outside EU, the influx of international graduate students is at a historic high. With my 1700 days in the line at a major housing company, I only got an apartment after three rounds of selection. The move-in was set at September 1st, two days since the semester start. During my first ten days in Uppsala, I lived at a friend's place. He was kind enough to let me sleep on a comfortable mattress in his living room. This guy and me, we were in the same class since freshman year. Now he's doing his master thesis. It's like living a life connected by three dots: BMC, the institute where he works; home; the ICA store where he purchases grocery. Life is boring and it sucks.
Scenario two: most of the people I knew since earlier are either taking a year off, or working on master thesis. There are few familiar faces in my classes. My social circle in Uppsala is facing a decline. My friend Anna with astonishing prowess in Chinese, went to China; Sven the nice dude from Chemical Engineering chose one year in Shanghai after losing a student board election; A clique of girls in my major either transferred to Gothenborg or remain in Adelaide on exchange. Other than my friends who departed, more are on their way to leave the town. Mohammad my IBO-alumnus is going to Chicago for his master thesis in a few months. Without the company of my closest friends, I'm yet again a new guy in town.
Scenario three: I finally moved into my new apartment. It seems like the previous patron from either India, Pakistan or Bangladesh abused the condo badly (his name was still on the mailbox). The wallpapers are completely greased. The doors are full of dents. The funniest part is, he even removed the light bulbs from the kitchen, the bathroom, and the closet. Something you definitely shouldn't do in a Swedish apartment for rent. This apartment came unfurnitured. The first few weeks in school are totally wasted on buying furnitures and making my home look good. Whenever I'm cooking or just hanging around, I keep finding new traces of past abuse. I don't wanna act like a racist. Though I strongly encourage people to not live into their own stereotype, giving the true racists reasons to justify their actions.
Scenario four: One of my best friend is supposed to write his bachelor thesis in Economics. However, due to a misunderstanding between him and his faculty advisor, he failed to register the thesis-writing as a course. This semester, he got no course registered. Which in turn meant no study aid from CSN, the Swedish Board of Study Aid. Initially we were supposed to share the apartment together with a third patron from China. Since he got no money, he had to back out. To fund his living, my troubled friend must find a job. I can't blame him, although I sincerely hope this transpiration won't disturb our perfectly maintained friendship. I'm sharing the apartment with two Chinese graduate students now.
Scenario five: it's gonna take longer before I can graduate. If I insist on having my master thesis in US, I must wait. Mohammad is going to Chicago in January, and he was accepted as early as in May. Two people from my major started their own iGEM team. Both of them got projects to work on stateside. They were admitted when I was still in Cornell and they are going in January as well. The lapse of at least one semester is required from the point one gets admitted til the actual visit. I realized when I was indulging myself with the Cornell experience, my Swedish classmates weren't sitting around doing nothing either. Since they stayed for a prolonged time in Uppsala and obtained experience within the local research sector, they gained an upper hand. Even with the valuable trainings Cornell offered, I ended up "in their game". For example, the iGEM folks would never peer into iGEM if they went abroad. They wouldn't know enough people in Uppsala to build a team and get financial support. In some sense, it's better to stay at one institute than moving around. It's good to get new experiences, but if you want to accomplish something, sometimes you have to settle down and let time fullfil its promises. I have no clue of what's gonna happen to me next semester. It would suck so much if I can't make it to USA before summer. I'll become a super-uber-senior who takes too long to graduate. Besides, I won't even have those friends with master thesis around me anymore. They'll be graduating in spring and leave the town.
Even with a few difficulties in my social as well as academic life, there are a few things I haven't lost my grip on. I'm mostly interested in synthetic biology. Unfortunately Uppsala has no research program or courses offered in the field. I want to find a lab in US working on it. To prepare myself, I signed up for a literature project course. You are to read articles on a given subject and submit a review. I chose synthetic biology. I want to read up on the subject so I will know for sure what I'm gonna work on. Also, it's a chance for me to prove myself for my future lab supervisor that I know a great deal about synthetic biology even without having worked in a synethic biology lab. My friend who offered me housing earlier suggested since Uppsala has no synthetic biology, I can perhaps bring it here. After working and gaining enough experience from my future research abroad, I should try to lead my own synthetic biolog team in Uppsala and become a professor. When that day comes, I must hire a bunch of good-looking babes as my students, and put my friend right in the middle of all those wonderful creatures. "By then, you can finally repay my favor!" He gave out a laughter.
Tomorrow is a big day. My parents are coming to help me furnish my room. After that it's an important meeting. I still love US much more than Sweden. Hopefully I'm going to see the "land of freedom" again in the near future.
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