The Glasses

Today I spent a whole morning at an Optometry clinic, getting my eye checked up for new perscription glasses. The clinic is run by the school, and so I was diagnosed by a graduate student and checked again by the “Doctor” to ensure the measurement and assessments are accurate. In other words, I was the test subject, the student is the test taker, the doctor is the test examiner, and my subjective answers can really make the life of another person very miserable. From my performance today, I think I did make it needlessly difficult for my examiner. (Intern: “Try to read the letter” Me: “um…. Z, wait…no, that’s like a S.. or is it a 4? I can’t make up my mind! Wait…” *silence for 5 seconds* “I don’t know, I give up.) Turned out the Doctor (test taker) found my answers so off mark and erratic that he came to test my vision personally by himself. Then, after another round of inaccurate guesses, he gave up as well, telling the intern “it was the fuzzy projector that projected the letters on the wall”.

After my checkup, I also got a new style of rims for my glasses. I initially wanted to just get something similar to what I had all throughout high school–in fact, I probably carried my old frame style back as early as 4th grade. Come to think of it, that must mean I have looked identical throughout the years in all of my photos with the same haircut and glasses. What made me switch styles? I initially found another identical style of generic glasses frame that I was about to leave with, and then I found that the glasses lady that accompanied me was actually helping me look for a pair of glasses as well (I thought she just ditched me, considering I’m a poor student accessing the University clinic). She came back with a black rimmed glasses and had me try it. It was a bit tight up front, and so I set it down and was about to announce my final choice of the old style I had in my hands. “Let me adjust this black one”, she said. A minute later, she came back with it slightly adjusted, but because I felt it still wasn’t smug, I set it back down. She took it back again and readjusted it.

I tried it again, and this time it fit pretty well and didn’t look too bad. I stood there swapping glasses on and off for about 3 minutes in front of the mirror, and in the mean time, the glasses lady stood beside me and watched. I couldn’t make up my mind, and so I gave her a look of despair. Finally, she called out, “Theresa, come here. Which glasses is better on him?” I did my glasses swapping, and as I slid on the black rimmed glasses, she immediately shot out, “That one”. The glasses lady beside me looked at me with a look that said, “I told you so”, and I finally conceded.

But why the contemplation in the first place? Is there a symbolic meaning to having switched styles, especially after all these years of having been used to a single kind? I’m not sure about what brought me to succumb to the black rimmed glasses. Am I more materialistic? Am I starting to care more about how I look? Is it a reflection of ego? I thought about the ramifications of “looking better” outwardly to others–a feature  I never really gave much thought about–and then I kind of shrugged it off. What can it all mean? Will my fate change from a pair of glasses? Now I’m scaring myself.

To be or not to be–I hate this question.

Stuck in a rut of conflicting emotions. There is a scholarship that is due in 4 days, a scholarship I’ve been thinking about since the Spring. It’s a very competitive program, and I wasn’t sure if I was up for applying since this will be an international competition, and 16 candidates will be selected from the United States. I have two ideas going on: cut and run, or full steam ahead. I have plenty of catch-up work I need to do as is, and adding the task of cranking out a Personal Statement in 3 days might just be a little too much, considering that finals are right in my face. There are essays to be written, personal things to contemplate, and applying for this when my chances don’t necessarily appear strong feels a bit unnecessary. But then again, there is other surge of emotions that is shouting: YOU ARE KILLING YOU OWN PROSPECTS BEFORE THEM!! It’s kind of ridiculous, to think that this is the first round and I am already wimping out, conceding that I am an incapable candidate in a tide of committments. If I can’t even muster the courage to apply in the first place, despite the odds, then I am truly no leader for this scholarship.

And then, the other voice strikes back with a rebuttal: I’m merely being pratical and strategic. I’m swamped, I have only a few days, I’m not super confidant with my direction, and with all these factors added up, it may not seem to be the smartest or brightest idea to apply if my chances aren’t high. But in high school, I remember how I didn’t apply for things when my application was strong, and people I knew I had a better resume than won in place of me–simply becauase I didn’t apply. But then am I applying for this because of my own ego? Am I going to embark on an ego-trip? But if I don’t even apply, then I know for sure I didn’t get it. The two ideas are fighting tooth and claw at one another, and the mess is getting to be jarring.

A leader is defined by actions, I remember my mentor saying. And as Martin Luther King said, “To not decide, is to decide.” In other words, my inaction is also a form of action, but a negative one. So I haven’t decided for month, and this has brought me to the point I am at now, between a rock and a hot place, just trying to get out before my skin is singed to a bacon strip by the heat of inaction. Again, the two actions are: cut and run, or full steam ahead. I’m going to give myself a chance, even if the application committee doesn’t. I am going to apply.

Verisimilitude

It’s interesting how virtual reality can be so immerseful that the entire frame of mind shifts with it like grass being blown by the wind. Three hours back, I was on my running workout and I was completely tuned in with my physical state, criss-crossing the parking lot and getting a really, really good rhythm going. In that state, I was absorbed with focusing on my balance as I side-stepped from lane to lane, torqing my torso and building a lot of fatigue in the process. Then came the diinner movie, “Wanted”, a movie about a group of self-righteous assasins who kill the names decrypted off of the threads of a loom because that is “deemed by fate”. As I watched the movie, I was transported to a different world of superpowers, of great violence, murder, death, and action. Then the movie ends, and I am in a state of limbo–not quite reality, not quite virtual reality. I made my transition back to reality by reading about the movie online, but as soon as I started surfing, I was brought to another dimension of perception. Now I want to do my Sociology essay and I find I am in no mental state to do so–traces of the alternate realities are still scattered and swimming around in my head. According to what I know, this kind of “state switching” and immersing in virtual reality is what is known as verisimilitude.

I thought verisimilitude might have been my answer as a “grounding practice”. I was speaking with a mentor a few days back, and we spoke about how all leaders have had a “grounding practice” they used to renew and refesh themselves. I remember during that conversation that I thought about the state of alternate reality when reading a book, and I imagined that perhaps I could cultivate reading as a habit for my grounding practice. But after yesterday, in which I tried unsuccessfully to get fully immersed in “Waiting for Godot”, and after today, in which I mixed up my mental focus by swapping amongst the states of verisimilitude, I am growing skeptical about verisimilitude being a grounding practice.

I considered many options for grounding: drawing, reading, exercising, blogging, reading the news, playing music, listening to music, etc. I’m not sure about what exactly is considered “grounding”, but I suspect that it is supposed to restore me, refresh my being and give me new focus by helping me “zoom out” and see my situation with more clarity. If that is the case, my options for grounding are limited to meditation and/or exercising. Allf othe other pratices are helpful for “getting out” of the current state, and though these may be helpful in helping me get out of the rhythm, they do not help bring me immediate focus for the task at hand. However, because they do change the pace, they are helpful in renewal in a long term sense. So from this, I conclude that grounding practices are divided to both short term and long term forms of renewal. If I want to keep a more sustained sense of focus, I will need to balance the verisimilitude shifting with immediate grounding practices for most clout. I’m also starting to feel that blogging may be a helpful grounding practice as well, as it has helped me organize my train of thought for typing. Anyways, I should be writing more often–that’s without a doubt.

A crack up and then some

I had a slight crack-up over the weekend, which explains (but only as an excuse) why I have not posted in the last few days. Call it a lack of time management, or perhaps poor discipline, but the train began with a pot of rice that has gone semi-bad. I have an idiosyncratic habit of wanting to conserve every morsel of edible food I come across (given the food is not ridiculously spoiled), and so naturally when I saw a half a pot of rice my roommate left out for a few days, I wanted to conserve, so I cooked it and ate it. Bad idea. It was a Friday Night, and I wanted to get lots of work done. I had my pot at around 5, and it sat uncomfortably in my stomach until 9. I had a walk and attended a bonfire event in between to help ease the transition of rice to pooh, but the metamorphosis did not go as planned. When I got home, my head was feeling the malaise of my stomach, and before long (after some effort), I had a cathartic throw-up which send bile and half-digested rice out of my system and into a plastic bag. My insides felt raw after, and although I felt much better, I was in no state to get work done. But that’s enough about my cathartic puke.

For two days after, I worked in solitude on a Poetry essay that took ages to work on. This sense of inefficiency combined with my pot-o-rice debacle put quite a drain on my motivation, and I began to doubt all of my endeavers. Thankfully, I was able to consult a few great thinkers who helped me walk out of this situation. Some ideas are as follows:

1. A French monk had a talk on the habit of happiness. Because all of the material causes of happiness are contingent on the pleasures we feel, the happiness changes easily according to circumstance: a cold person may enjoy the initial sense of warmth near the fire, but give him too much, and this pleasure quickly turns to pain. From this train of logic, the monk cites cognitive studies on the effects of meditation and interal regulation. In many cases, the advanced studies conclude that the mind is indeed the vessel for happiness so it should be honed daily.

2. A pastor talked about the capacity of influence. What is the nature of influence and why is it necessary? The central question asked was “what is in your hand”, with the “what” referring to the position, power, wealth, and status you have. What use is influence if it is not exercised properly for those who have no capacity for influence? I thought about his words and his actions of donating 90% of his money to charity groups and was impressed by his conviction in his creed.

3. The last inspiration I got from an assortment of emails. One read “To change your lifestyle, you have to change the way you think”. I found this to be very powerful in that it made me notice that all of the troubles I complained about existed only because of how I was thinking about what I did. “A way of thinking”, the quote adds, “even if it is false, can affect us if we imagine it to be true”.

There are many things to be grateful for, and these are among the many influences that have helped me through the difficult times of introspection. I will learn to have the courage to exercise my influence for those who don’t have any.

Nature

I decided to run in the mountains today as a way of clearing my head, and surprisingly, I found the course I ran to feel like an uncanny metaphor to my own brain. As I jogged upon the dirt trails, I look at the trees before me, how they are parted and stand on each side of the trail, and I could feel a sense of reaching out. Moving upon the upward path was tiring, but with each step I took, the forests around me grew increasingly dense, and the leaves and branches began to hold hands with one another. The entire network of branch and leaves above me felt like the neuro-connections in a brain, and as I made the comparison, all of a sudden the entire ground and earth underneath me felt like a giant, throbbing brain.

Yes, it felt weird at first, but when I continued to run up the path and pretend I am an electric current running through the brain of earth, it was quite exhilarating. But then I realized that trees had roots, and that not only were the wiry networks crisscrossing above me, underneath me lay thousands of unseen roots that form different levels of interaction. These, I took to be kind of a “wired” tendency inside me, the visceral, emotion impulses that are not rational but quite fundamental to who I am. With the interaction of both the networks above and below me, I ran the dirt road slowly, breathing and admiring the shiny rays of an orange sun–rays that penetrate through the thick network and run along the trail up the hill.

What was I thinking? I tried to make sense of what I saw, tried to bestow meaning upon it in hopes that I can emerge from my run a more sophisticated, mature individual. But I didn’t get much. The sky was a mix of peach, soft orange, pearl pink, and violet–too beautiful–and I was so intent on soaking it in that I couldn’t think. For just a moment, as I stood there against the sky, looking down at the bustling city, the sparkling cars, the minature bridges, and the ocean, I forgot about my presentations tomorrow, my two essays due, my reading passages, my math assignments, my research proposal, my social obligations–everything. It was a moment of pure immersion, and it was a much needed moment of awestruck solitude.

After the hill, after the fascination, I made my journey back down to ground and into the city where my apartment and my homework await me, waiting to be completed.

Dude, I just got Licensed

This weekend, I went to the green festival and stumbled into the “green web tech” section of the festival. While I roamed around and found out about the various new projects, I also found a “creative commons” booth. Given that I spent some time doing research on open source, I was naturally curious about what exactly the creative commons license website does. I know what the license is–it grants some right to the creator of the original work–but I don’t know why there would be a site on it. And then, as I talked with the representative, I found out that literally anyone can get a creative commons license for any work they do! So after coming back from the festival, I decided to do just that: get a creative commons license.

As you may notice to the right side of my webpage (you have to scroll down a little), there is now a spiffy looking new tab that looks really cool and says my work is under the “Creative commons license, non-commercial and no derivatives”. What that means is that people could check out my work, redistribute it, but they must attribute it back to me and make no changes to what I have done. And if people violate my license policies, I will have the law behind me if I decide to pursue and lawsuit and sue. Of course, I don’t think what I write necessarily warrants a creative commons license protection, but it was just plain thrilling to license my work and write a short blog post about having licensed it. Only in America, man. Only in America.

Bitter bitter love

It has been a while since I played games, and it’s been a while since I even reflected on having played games. I’ve quit gaming in high school, after two years in which I have been consumed in its lecherous, addictive purple flames. Like all gamers, I played for the thrill of gaming; but unlike typical gamers, I wasn’t a “real” gamer, so to speak. I cheated. When I played, I got the codes punched in early, geared up with the good stuff, shot through the levels, defting swimming through annoying intermediary “bad guys”,  knocking out the bosses like bowling pins in the process. Unlike most gamers, my thrill was not in skill training–I did not have the patience to build up a habit of maneuvering in a game. Rather, my thrill was in the plot, the storyline of the dominating hero that saves this and that, reaps this and that, encounters this and that, upgrades to this and that, defeats this and that, and wins. It can only be explained as a ego-trip, as how pointless and monotonous could it be to go through the motions once and again for the same trite kind of storyline? Perhaps that’s what made me quit.

But fate has me by the tail and is now pulling me in a direction I did not intend to go: I am now in charge of the “game night” at my job. It’s ridiculous, really, for a retired old battered cheating gamer like me to consider going back to games. After all, I’ve told myself I quit for good and decided to pursue life–I wasn’t even a legit gamer in the first place. But then again, fate likes things his way, and just as I thought I could BS my way through hosting the game night, I was approached by an ambitious resident who has a whole network setup and is calling for a full-on tournament with 50$ prizes, elimination charts, and “5-on-5 DoDas”. What the hell is DoDa anyways?

But after the initial mixed feelings, I began to think about things a little more clearly and came to shockingly sober conclusion: is gaming as bad as I  thought it was? At first, I shunned it becuase it wasted time and didn’t help me learn anything, but now that I thought of it, could I manage to play Warcraft III without using cheats and beat people with sheer skill? That’s when the notion of “5-on-5″ popped up again: 5 young, self confidant and trained gamers, testing their skills against another set of 5 young, self confidant and trained gamers. That’s when I began to felt a little tinge of excitement: what if I were part of a team of 5 going against another team? Sheer skill, I thought to myself, and gaming just might be worth investigating.

Ultimately, my conclusion is this: because the internet is becoming the world as we know it, understanding that gaming is a community within that new world is something I will have to face. I’ve broken from my gaming past, but that is because it was with a past perspective. Now that I recognize that gaming is a social phenomenon with not only psychological, social, and technical implications (let’s not forget massive finger clicking), I can explore it without guilt with new lens that can help me learn. Come game night this Friday, I might just Doda.

Surprised by Open Source

The more I research about Open Source, the more I am surprised by the possiblities it brings. For one thing, I never recognized that the country of Malaysia actually organized a whole 3-step system to integrating Open Source technology into almost every major aspect of its infrastructure (Public, Educational, Technical, etc). The project is currently at phase 2, meaning it has already laid the groundwork for the basic system and is now working on sustaining and accelerating it into becoming self-sustainable. Again, I’m still quite stoked about the fact that a WHOLE COUNTRY has decided to adopt the open source technology as the foundation of its instructure.

But that was just the beginning to a series of surprises. I also learnd that Korea is actually starting an “Open Source City” project in which it tries to orient the structure of the city into a more open source based spine. But let’s not forget China, which has a government organization set up also; and India, which is just beginning to get serious about adopting Open Source. Across the board, developing countries are embracing Open Source as the alternative to proprietary software from American giants such as Microsoft. What will this prove to do for not only the American economy, but also for the countries themselves?

For one thing, it’s clear why Open Source is the choice for many of these countries: no only is it free, it is open, collaborative, and highly sustainable once adopted. The fact that so many people in rising economies are going to be operating in the new 21st century world of internet proliferation through Open Source speaks to how powerful such an interactive network is. The internet was created on the basis of being able to communicate with other around the globe, and it seems that Open Source is the destined brain child of the internet infrastructure. Within the next ten to twenty years, there is no doubt that Open Source will dominate the internet, perhaps posing as the greatest threat propriety software will ever face in the process, and the possiblities from such a developed web of interaction will be incredibly exciting to be around to witness.

Symphony at the Academic Center

Click Clack, Click Clack, hmmmmmmmm.

The young girl in yellow, smiles and waves,

her face so pure friendly, so practiced

that it must have taken much work to be so perfect.

_

Click Clack, Click Clack, hmmmmmmm.

The aged man in CAL-gear, chits and chats,

his clothes so full of school spirit, so collected

that it must have taken much to buy them all.

_

Click Clack, Click Clack, hmmmmmm.

The young girl in black, shifts and fidgets,

her turban so shaded like her mood, so uncertain,

that it must have taken much discomfort to have her leave.

_

Click Clack, Click Clack, hmmmmmm.

The security in front, chuckles and laughs

his eyes so absorbed to the screen, so plugged

that it must have taken much to be so tickled.

Out of Context

For the past 24 hours, I’ve been working on a research project based on exploring the “Open Source” technology. Initially, the “Open Source” lingo is derived from the sharing of computer ’source codes’ that allow for other producers to open, modify, exchange, and redistribute software with one another. This computer-centric lingo, however, began to take on a broader meaning of a grassroots effort at collaboration and has been taken to different contexts.

For instance, on the day after Obama’s win, Alex Castellanos of CNN likened the coming Obama administration to an “open source model” of collaboration that was described in the book “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”. The book compared the proprietary software organization of the computer industry to a “Cathedral model” that is top down and the open source organization to a “bazaar model” that is mutual and bottom up. In drawing the open source metaphor from a book and then proceeding to drag it into political discourse, Alex Castellanos taken the meaning of the phrase out of the initial computer context and brought it multiple distances away.

Does the political metaphor deviate from the initial philosophy of “Open Source”? For one thing, the original idea of open source suggests that there is a “program” that is present, and the internal structure of such a program is transparent to all so people could modify it, upgrade it, and then pass it on. This collaborative process of modification and redistribution are central to the idea of Open Source, yet I don’t foresee any old Joe the Plumber going into washington to “fix the system up”. The entire “top down” system of politics in Washington is still very much in place, and this transparency and openness is simply impossible in the world of Politics. Secondly, the Open Source definition has ten strictly defined qualifications, including “no discrimination between groups of people or fields of endeaver”. However, partisanship and discrimination through powerplay of lobbying groups is what Washington is about, and I can’t imagine that ending during the Obama Administration either.

So in conclusion, I don’t think the “Open Source” reference to an Obama Administration is apt. It is an interesting connection, yes, but none of the parallels of the comparision are accounted for.