As a madder of fact

MMXII

I had every intention of writing out a long post on my goals for the new year. For the sake of brevity, hopefully a shorter list of abstractions suffices:

• Take more leaps. In the past few years, my best decisions have been spontaneous and risky: leaving Alaska and traveling to India stand out. I would like to continue this trend.
• Listen more, speak less. This doesn’t require justification. People love to talk, so it is best to listen incase they say something memorable.
• Keep a level head. Lessen my usage of illicit substances, perhaps nullifying it completely. Meditate more. Write more.
• Draw inspiration outside of the usual sources. I’ve recently looked mainly to the blogosphere, occasionally literature, and the musings of friends/acquaintances for inspiration in the past. I would like to consider art and poetry more heavily.
• Stop thinking ahead. Things tend to work out the way they were always intended to.

(working list)

Consumerism has always been a difficult subject for me. As a child of Asian immigrants, I have often struggled with striking a balance between grateful privilege and realized duty. Put another way, between taking advantage of the benefits my parents have worked so hard to provide and being conscientious of materialism’s detriments. 

Of course, these two options are not mutually exclusive. To be sure, my quality of life has been influenced greatly by what most would label mainstream consumerism—my family has always provided a comfortable lifestyle replete with the amenities expected in the middle-class tax bracket. At the same time, the availability of such resources meant opportunities for education, which served to uncover the harsh realities of consumerism, e.g. global poverty, environmental degradation, and least importantly the deterioration of American intellectualism among my peers.

The classic dichotomy: head versus heart.

Letters make words make sentences make paragraphs.

I bet Erick will give me a hard time for initiating this post after a blatantly praising discussion of a certain pen-and-pad-inclined brunette. That’s not a whole lot at stake though—if opportunity cost has taught me anything, the loss of sleep comes at a minor, albeit discernible, cost.

With that largely irrelevant introduction, I’d like to get to the point: I’m here to write about writing. Not necessarily in a critical manner or anything like that. Mainly as a way to elucidate my looming aspirations to make something of myself, whatever that means.

As it stands, I am one semester, 18 credits, and 15 or so weeks away from being a college graduate. To those who are not close to me, this is supposed to signify my progression as a Very Serious Person. (I borrow this term from Paul Krugman, though its origins are beyond me.) I am one step closer toward actualizing the American Dream. Go to school, get a job, have a family. However, for those who have had the displeasure of engaging in dialogue with me, a college education has served less as a catalyst toward normality and more so a systematic perpetuation of my general confusion. Good God, someone is feeding textbooks to these animals.

So what did I go to college to learn? If we’re meeting for the first time, I would probably tell you that the financial crisis of 2008 spurred me into academic action in an effort to understand the who, what, when, and why of the proceeding recession. Naturally, this led to studying economics. Off the cuff, it was the most relevant, most interesting, and least burdensome of the possible routes toward understanding. If I ask this question to myself, however, the answer is different. The brutally honest, unfiltered reason for going to college is because, firstly, my parents expected me to, and I expected myself to.  This should come as no surprise to anyone who understands the workings of first-generation Asian-Americans.

Secondly, and arguably most importantly, I came to college to figure out what the fuck I’m good at. Mathematics and statistics? Decent enough to analyze and reach conclusions about a set of numbers, maybe even help you understand how I got to these conclusions. Business and economics? Arguably above-average by most accounts. Whether this success comes as a result of natural acumen or simple diligence remains to be seen, but if we’re going by numbers I make the cut. Writing? So… this is where it gets kind of interesting.

I find it difficult to track down a point in time where I got “into writing.” For as long as I can remember, I’ve written journal entries. In middle school and the earlier half of high school, I wrote mostly to impress my peers. After that, it happened as a default outlet or because I had to. So where has this gotten me? My transcript is marked with exceptional grades in writing-intensive courses, and I was even awarded a “Pass with Distinction” on my university writing portfolio—apparently placing me in the top 15% of writers at my school. I’ve been paid (fairly generously, I might add) by others to write a variety of assignments, from speeches on water policy in Ghana, to 30-page law reviews on habeas corpus. Yet, writing as an activity remains something I do as opposed to something that I am. Perhaps nothing is as disappointing.