Mafia or bust

There is a principle I try to follow but had to refuse today that read: “Always do the thing that can only be done at that specific time and specific place.” In other words, if I were at the library, I would spend the time doing what can only be done at a library. If while studying at the library I met a friend I hadn’t met in ages, I would stop to chat because that would be the thing I could only do at that time and place. Today, there was a crowd of eight in my room socializing but I quit the scene early to retreat to the solitary corner that is my blog. That’s right, I chose not to do the only thing that could be at the specific time and place (namely, socializing with the group that has gathered) because of one word: Mafia.

“Mafia” is a role-playing guessing game in which the participants play invisible roles and try to find the ‘murderer’ who is quietly picking off the students they feel could reveal/accurately guess their identities. Each round, there is a Mafia who kills, a nurse who ‘heals’, and a police who accuses. The catch is, no one knows the true identity of the others except the narrator. In other words, the Mafia could kill off a police officer early on and pretend he is the police (no one can object because the real police is dead), or he could kill the nurse to make sure no one is being prevented from being killed. The job of the police is to accuse the right suspect (narrator reveals truth at night if the police guesses right) and the job of the nurse is to anticipate who the murderer is going to kill and keeping the person alive (even if that means that the person is the nurse character itself.) At the end of each round, the group also has to nominate and vote to ‘kill off’ who they think is the killer. If the group guesses wrongly, innocent people (including police or nurse) could be killed.

This is a game of intense persuasion and deception, and as the game goes on, I find myself on an island of my own while the waves of mixed social message lash and crash and flow around me, inundating me in chaos. I like to be certain about the decisions I make and I make strong use of logic. Unfortunately, in this heavily social game, the logic employed is entirely different than what is usual and much guessing and intuition is involved. But how can I make a decision if there isn’t enough evidence? What if there is contradictory evidence presented from multiple parties? How accurate is intuition? What shapes intuition and what makes it accurate? To what degree of certainty can I trust my hunch to make the right decisions? In the game, all of these questions are meshed together and dropped upon me like hail in a storm and I have to dodge and make decisions in real time. Although rationally, I know that the game would help me learn to read people and reason on a social level, but after drawing the ‘villain’ card for the third time, it was simply too much for me.

Playing the ‘killer’ in the guessing game “Mafia” was the most difficult thing I have done thus far in college, and unfortunately, I had to play the killer many times. Okay, maybe the game was not quite my hardest endeaver in college, but as a game of truth and falsehood, it was still quite a challenge and even stressful. I couldn’t lie well, so finding out my role was always a dead giveaway. “What is your defense?”, I was asked once asked as I was suspected of being the killer. “Well, I think I’m guilty”, I replied. And then I got killed off for being the Mafia. Not the most convincing Mafia in town by any means.

Ultimately, I concluded that I needed to step out of my comfort zone more often and learn from the all experiences—villainous or otherwise. The principle of “doing the thing that could only be done at a specific time” should have been upheld, and I must now get off my laptop to engage the crowd that is still in my room. Wish me luck.

On Hands and Keys

First day of class and I am already being forced to reconsider past routines and study habits. As I sat in my Statistics class today, my professor gave an interesting little vignette about a gadget-savvy student who went from Star-Wars themed study program (arming himself with blackberries, a behemoth laptop with a reversible web-cam, recorders, voice amplifiers, and other accessories that could make Batman proud) to a normal student, stripped down to the elegant simplicity of paper and pen. The professor was amused and intrigued by this little devolution process and approached the student to ask. “I kept a good record and took good notes”, the student replied, “but I couldn’t retain anything.”

For the past year, I have been taking some impressive (self-proclaimed, of course) notes with my handy dandy, sleek and shiny 12 inch Apple laptop. Every so often when this baby is pulled from its skin-tight sheath, I would get comments about how small it is and how convenient it must be to use. Indeed, it is quite light and convenient. So convenient, in fact, that I have begun to digitize much of what I do, including my class notes, schedules, stickies, etc. It’s an all-in-one, really, and carrying around the laptop makes it easy to access the internet or blog or do other things as I work on class notes and am kept up to date about my priorities. Most importantly though, are the notes, how impeccably organized they turn out to be–and easily archived too! The laptop has truly been the stalwart companion when it came to capturing the lectures with breakneck speeds, and I wouldn’t have survived some of my more information intensive classes without it.

And yet I am now questioning its merit. It is true that I am able to record and organize the details in class more comprehensively, but I do so more loosely and with less discipline. I am no longer trimming my notes, but rather repeating concepts and retyping them over and over again because I have the luxury of speed. Besides the sheer volume of notes that result from this lack of discipline, I also take more time to process and memorize the information. That could be due to the hypothesis that typing is less impressionable than actual pen-in-hand writing, or it could be due to the psychology of foolish complacency (“Whew, got em all down on my laptop now. Now when was that party again?”) Either way, there are flaws to the laptop notes system and should be considered in lieu of the option of returning to antiquity.

So what could writing do? For one thing, actual writing is a more complicated process. Typing is translating the symbolic representations of thought and ideas through the moving of fingers in a sequence determined by an organized, systematic template (keyboard). In other words, typing is rehearsing a muscle memory that has already been established to crank out thoughts and ideas. There is no difference and variation in how you type: if you hit the right key with the right finger, you will get a letter that is standardized in all instances in which that key is hit (unless you change the font, of course.) Writing, on the other hand, involves a more precise motion that is inherently more expressive in the number of variables it has to manipulate to write.

For instance, the strength I use determines the weight of the lines I create; the style I choose changes the flair of the font I attempt; and the mood I am in shapes the emotion in the letters I make. Like snowflakes, no letter I make will ever be the same. Moreover, every single letter is created by me and each is unique because I made it so. I could choose to pucker the round of my “a’s” or stretch out the curve of my “c’s”, I could loop the hook of my “r’s” or fatten up the waistlines of my “o’s”—whatever. My options are always infinite and completely in my hands.

Ultimately, typing by computer is a great tool in that it is fast, efficient, and organized. Not only can more of the lectures be recorded (thanks to the muscle memory of fingers), word documents can be stored, copied and manipulated at any given time. Theoretically, the archived word document can last forever, making it immortal and capable of transcending time and space. Although traditional writing is no where as ‘powerful’ as typing, there is a certain ineffable in its expression that makes it intimate and personal, a rhythm that creates the ‘feel’ and aesthetics unique to the writer. So there we have it: immortality on the one hand, distinctiveness on the other. Look hard enough, and you will find a student stuck in the middle, in love with both, torn by both, but still unable to come to terms with the two even having just finished writing an entire article about them.

Be Careful what you wish for

For the majority of my last year, I shunned social interactions and refused to join clubs and meet new people in order to allot time for adjusting to the academic load of college. It was a year characterized by a lot of reverie, of time spent alone in study lounges and quiet libraries, and many times as I studied, I looked out the window and wished I could fly into the blue and disappear into the distance. So that was first semester, a time passed in relative misery. After that bitter episode , I decided to live a more balanced life, perhaps one not so stringent and demanding to the point that it becomes stifling and counterproductive. In short, I wanted more social interaction in my life.

And more social interaction I got. After taking up my new job of helping out new students, I was interacting for hours each day, talking with different people one after another to the point of exhaustion. I just had my 6 hour dose today, and as exhilarating as it is, it is also tiring. In weight lifting, there is a lifting routine that emphasized working to “failure” where the muscles could take no more. My current state is the speech equivalent to ‘failure’. My face muscles went numb, my tonal variety  flattened out, and I began having trouble smiling. All I can say before I go off to bed is: be careful what you wish for. But have fun anyways.

Raisin in Academic Jargon

So you see, these raisins the this bowl of porriage are agents of change, in that each individual pellet contributes to the expression and holistic impression of the meal. Insignificant as they are upon inspection, the lack of them or the overabudance of them could turn a pleasant meal into a surprisingly distasteful one.

To be sure, each wrinkly piece moderates and bridges the gap of tastelessness and tastefulness while providing for the well being of its client in the healthful nutrients it offers in its consumption. In this regard, these raisins are no longer negligible units of a incoherent mass, but rather, vital citizens inthe microcosm of the community that is oatmeal.

Layman rendition: “Dude, these raisins are pretty good man. This oatmeal would taste like crap without them.”

It’s raining Freshmen!

It’s that time of year again, when you walk down the street and the sidewalks are decorated with household appliances and curious looking students who stand and wait in long lines, anxious to move-in. There are usually a good abundance of parents as well, and for the students who are trying to look casual and fit in, having parents nearby carrying bathroom utensils and bedsheets certainly feels awkward and uncomfortable. As a Freshmen, I knew I was embarrassed when my dad carried the box of Organic Soymilk into the elevator and down the hall where I knew all my floor mates were unpacking. Talk about making good first impressions.

Back then, it didn’t feel like there were as many people, perhaps because I was also busy moving my stuff as well. This year is certainly more hectic, and since I had already finished settling my materials in my new apartment, I had the luxury of “Freshmen watching”—the sport in which you walk down the street for no apparent reason and just enjoy the pandemonium unfolding around you. One can feel a buzz around the environment as the cars move in and out of the parking structure, as the parents load and unload the trunk, and as the crowds go up and down the slow and tired elevator. To add to the ordered chaos, a few stray cars wander about in the sea of metal, lost in the new place and caught without mapquest. The air here is thickened by the exhaust of cars and moves slow like molasses. Welcome to Berkeley, guys.

You really realize just how many students there are until you begin to meet them all. As an employee of the student center, I was given the responsibility of helping  incoming students learn about the center and its resources. But instead of sitting behind a table and surfing on Facebook like I expected in the earliest shift (as they say, “the early bird gets the worm”), I ended up having to spend hours setting up internet connections.  It was very long, yes, but ultimately also very rewarding and fulfilling as well.

The End

During the Beijing Olympics opening ceremonies, I was in Los Angeles with a crowd of friends; now, at its closing, I am in Berkeley with no one but myself, left to think about the two weeks of the greatest sports even on earth. My current state is inconsolable, and the phrase I currently have  stuck in my head is: You have got to be kidding me. No, seriously. The greatest, most expensive, extensive, well rehearsed and dedicated Olympics games that has ever come to existence (with none in the foreseeable future with any chance of topping it) was hosted by the country of my ethnic origin, a country I’ve thought much about when thinking about my cultural roots in America, and I AM NOT THERE TO EXPERIENCE IT–you have got to be kidding me.

For some reason, as I watched the closing ceremonies, I felt a strong disappointment in not being able to be there to take in the entire experience, raw, uncut and whole. True, I may not get the close-up shots of the athletes I have come to know and admire, but just being there, being a part of that history rather than being a spectator from a distant television set is enough. If I wanted pristine video shots, I would buy myself the official Olympics DVD online after I got home. There were a lot of familiar faces at the Olympics, including Jackie Chan, Wong Lee-Hom, Jacky Zhang, and others. Call it a megalomania complex, but I felt like I belonged there at the Stadium with them. Maybe not with them on stage, but at least with them in the same space, breathing the same air, and soaking in the same overwhelming tide of sensations.

But no, the Beijing Olympics are now over. The athletes from around the world are slowly dispersing into the different corners in the world, back to their hometowns where they will be celebrated and honored for their accomplishments. On screen, these athletes existed as representatives of countries, icons emptied of history, and were tied to entities much greater than themselves. But now, they must return home and face the mundane. For some, that is returning to work; for others, that is going to school. Yet for all of these athletes, their lives will be forever changed by the Olympics they attended.  My life will change also—not because I attended the Olympics, but because I wasn’t able to attend it.

How a Political skeptic became optimistic

A few days back, CNN hosted a debate between Obama and McCain. Since watching this debate, my roommate has been voicing his exasperation about the political process, declaring every once in a while his complete loss of faith in our government system if only to get rid of the bad aftertaste of being disillusioned. Not only does he hold the pandering politicians in contempt, he is also disappointed in the idiotic mass that eats the stuff up like hogs in a trough. This feeling is not unfamiliar to me, for I also once felt too righteous to condone the obvious corruptions in the system. I despised the power-play of lobby groups and hated the way the games were rigged to help the most glib of politicians win. In short, I was also once a cynic.

But then, with time, I learned that politics is not just a government process but a part of life. Every organization and every system involves power dynamics, and the balance of power is determined differently in different contexts. In the case of our democratic society,  power is played out through the Capitalist machine (a system run on money) and translated into lobbyists and special-interest groups who vote in support of certain values. Of course, no politician can satisfy every agenda, and as a result, politicians must divvy up the different (if not outright conflicting) groups to best represent the values they hold  in order to form a ‘constituency base’ that ensures their re-election. Such is life, and I don’t blame politicians for acting the way they do—it’s all about the incentives involved.

After accepting that politics is inevitable, I decided to learn more to be better informed  about the subject, thus beginning my ‘education journey’. Rather than run away, I attempted to better understand issues by observing them from many perspectives. In weighing out the pros and cons and seeing through the tricks politicians pull to make certain viewpoints more appealing than others, I come to more reasoned conclusions based on my own thinking. These experiences have brought me to the conclusion that having a balanced education is the first step to continuing and improving upon a democracy run on the Capitalistic system. Although the United States is a full ‘democracy’,Capitalism creates the money distribution that provide lobbyists with the leverage to influence policy makers. In other words, the discrepancy in wealth also results in a discrepancy in public policy as richer, more well represented groups are given priority over others.

Why does money play such a huge role in determining the political process? Mainly because there is not enough education to help the general populace make better informed decisions about policy. The money earned by politicians are used to run dumbed-down and sugarcoated campaign advertisements as a way of getting the public to vote for values rather than policy. With an adequately balanced education, however, the public will be able to see through the illusion and recognize the underlying policy to determine for themselves how they will vote. In other words, in a society where everyone votes and has a balanced education, few will fall for the simplistic sound bites and ads specifically designed by politicians to prey on the uninformed.

2001: A Space Odyssey

To begin with, let me state the obvious and establish that unless this film is understood on a deeply symbolic level, it will be as incoherent as pig Latin. I have not cultured enough film knowledge to really understand the subtext underlying the film, but I did appreciate the art: its composition, color and placement. I have yet to see such daring use of color in a movie–in such quantity, too–to the point in which the brightness of the wide swaths of pure color challenges the viewer’s eyes. Additionally, the score interacts well with the motion of the movie, and many times, the grand, majestic eloquence of the orchestra made the eerie and ominous sensations evoked in the film that much stronger. A daring, original masterpiece.

Overall though, there were a few interesting themes that I caught and thought were worth noting: for one, there is the American-centered plot suggesting the ubiquitous white-male supremacy. The strategic placement of the American flags and the white dominated cast were enough to give things away, but what truly brought out the themes was the role of women as hostesses who serve–pamper, rather–the males on ship. The beginning of the spaceship scene, for instance, begins with the camera focused almost entirely on a floating pen that is caught by a young hostess and returned delicately to the sleeping male passenger. There is a strong trace of the 70s throughout the film, and the treatment and status of the women in relation to the men is a dead giveaway to the politics of the time.

Technology was also an important theme. In the Dawn of Man clip, the apes once lived relatively peaceful lives and roamed around eating plants next to these long snouted pig animals. Although the species sometimes come into slight conflict with one another, they remained good neighbors and respected one another. With the presence of bone tools, however, the apes began a carnivorous diet and the clueless long-nosed pigs that once lived along side them became dinner.  The bone tools that created a strength advantage also perpetrated the desire to overpower and conquer others, and before long, it allowed a certain tribe of apes to commit the first act of interspecies murder and war.

Technology continues later on as the unremarkable conveniences of daily life that become highly remarkable when the technology turns on the human race. In the film, this is represented by the A.I. machine, Hal, who controls almost the entire ship. The scenario of the ‘technology created by man’ turning on its master is repeated in many Sci-Fi films, but in this particular clip, Hal represents not just technology, but in fact a kind of interactive technology that both affects and is affected by human beings. Extending this template of the convenient interactive technology, one could easily apply the concept to modern technologies such as the television, internet, cellphone, etc. These subtle daily necessities have become integrated into life, and it is all the more important to note how the relationships balance out: are we master to or are we mastered by the technologies in our lives?

Another interesting symbol is the black monolith that showed up at the very beginning of the film and continued to appear throughout the film during the most unexpected moments. After the apes first touched the black monolith, they had the ingenuity to create stone tools. After the astronauts touched the black monolith, they heard a high pitched frequency that directed them to a space odyssey to Jupiter. After the last surviver of the Jupiter mission touched the black monolith, he fell into a psychedelic  trance that brought him to a seemingly different dimension. What do these all have in common?

I personally think that the black monolith is symbolic for knowledge. After the first ape had his insight, he used his knowledge to gain resources and dominate his peers. This advantage triggered the power of evolution and led to a domino effect that advanced the brain to cultivate traits that favored the absorption of knowledge. Since then, the bone tool technology has grown into the modern miracles of space travel–a progressive feat resulting from the contact with knowledge.

Upon landing on the moon, the astronauts found another monolith, and this time, one that released an unknown frequency directed towards Jupiter. In the trip to Jupiter, man and technology (Hal) came into conflict and the last crew on the ship had to fight his way into the recesses of the machine to override its system. After he took control and overcame the machine, the mission briefing of the journey was announced. This briefing, I feel, represents the beginnings of wisdom. Until man burrows deep within himself and inspects the workings of his mind, he will be slave to the technologies (and its ramifications) that are ever present and remain ignorant to the direction and purpose of his ultimate journey, life.

Being given this briefing, however, is only the beginning. Later on, the surviver goes through a series of wild, colorful, chaotic, and abstract landscapes that shake him and drive him to the brink of madness until finally, he lands in a locked Venetian room. As he walks out in his space suit, he see an middle aged man dining in the center of the room–the man is him! The middle-aged man in turn sees an old man in the bed who in turn sees and reaches out for the black monolith. The initial cryptic shape-shifting  ‘colorscapes’, I feel, represent the experiences in life. No matter how the experiences change, however, one thing remains constant: the passage of time. No matter how much knowledge is gained from experience, time passes, and the transition from the young astronaut to the middle-aged and old man represents this passage.

Ultimately, as the dying old man extends his hand for that black monolith he sought long ago, he does so with the understanding that it will forever be out of his reach. This pursuit for knowledge ends with him transforming into a child, and by the end of the movie, his baby form looms in space, as large as the planets, with eyes wide-open as if shocked awake by some new, rude understanding of the universe.

Fighting Dead Beat Lethargy

There was a quote I heard a while ago that said, “a healthy body makes for a healthy mind”. “Common sense”, I thought, “isn’t that obvious?” Yes it is, but now, after nearly half a month of not exercising due to various events here and there in my life, I have come to realize just how real that quote is. Not only do I have mucus down my throat, my mood levels have been more unstable, my stomach has been feeling flabby, my discipline is hardly at the level I was expecting it to be, and I have nascent pimples waiting to poke out of my face to see the light. In short, I feel kind of like an orange that has been refrigerated for half a month: normal on the outside, but dried and pulpy on the inside.

It is all psychological, of course, but my physical state certainly plays a big role in affecting my mentality. So what were some symptoms of this epidemic? I had many decisions to make with deadlines coming up fast, but I set them off until they were nearly due and finished them in a half-assed manner. I dawdled and meandered around the room in a loose and unfocused manner. I overslept and snoozed the alarm when I’m supposed to adapt to early morning schedules. I overate–many times. Etc. Etc. Pretty bad, I know. Considering all the great changes and things I want to accomplish for this semester, this lifestyle is not looking good. But why in the world am I writing about this?

For one, writing is therapeutic, and spilling out the mistakes I see in my life is like draining the pus in an infected wound. It is not a pretty sight, and it is certainly nothing all that interesting. But for me, personally, it is a decisive surgical cut, a declaration to myself and to the world that these are the problems I will change. Also, by writing all this, I fulfill my commitment of writing a post each day. I forced myself to sit down and type in spite of my moods, to overcome the state of inaction with action. The will to action is a muscle, and it is a mental muscle I used to train each day as I worked out my physical muscles. It’s time to exercise it again.

A Daredevil with a Smile

As a track and field runner in high school, I thought that I had a vague idea of what it must feel like to be an athlete. After a few days of watching the Olympics, I discovered I was wrong. The thousands in the stands cheering and the unseen billions around the world changed that. I saw Michael Phelps coming out of the water, hands raised and face strained in a roar of victory; Alicia Sacramone falling off the balance beam with a confused look that forced itself to focus into determination; Liu Xiang limping away after a false start and the entire stadium settling into solemn silence—moments that shape, make, break, and recreate athletes over and over again. Imagine all of this pressure, and then place it on the shoulders of a young 16 year old girl and and you have the American gymnist Shawn Johnson.

For the past few days, I’ve watched the Women’s Gymnastics finals and for almost all of events, it came down to Chinese and American athletes going head to head until one of the two claimed gold. Shawn Johnson claimed three silvers: one for team, one for floor exercises, and one for all around. And then, yesterday, in the final women gymnastics event, she finally triumphed over the competition and claimed gold in the balance beam event.

So what is it that brought me to blog about her? Hasn’t many athletes won gold metals before? If I had only watched the event, then yes, Shawn Johnson would have been just another athlete. But after reading a bit about how her family mortgaged the house to keep up her lessons and seeing her adorable smile when she completed her last routine, Shawn Johnson became less icon and more human. Her short and stocky figure adds to that youthful innocence, and I kind of wished I knew her more as a person. She seemed very personable and simple, but very determined at the same time—someone I know I could be good friends with.

I found that throughout Olympics, the overwhelming number of superstars create a playing field that makes it difficult to appreciate the true value of these athletes. All of these people worked for years, spending countless hours each day training and regulating their diets. Practicing a skill each day alone takes incredible patience and commitment, let alone training enter the Olympics; yet at the starting line, none of sweat and tears are obvious. All that is seen is the sudden burst of beauty and motion, usually lasting for seconds, and a procession of nations: Zambia, Canada, Yugoslavia, Korea, America, etc–countries that are gone through one by one like people at the airport waiting in their socks to cross the metal detector. With quantity, the super no longer appear to be that much so. Even though some of the super athletes who claim metals go on to become icons, symbols, representations–even legends–most are not recognized as being as human and as full of history as they deserve to be. It took Shawn Johnson, the little daredevil with a smile, to help me realize that.