Fuzz

A dimple near the temple of the head

quiet and humble next to the ear.

It sleeps, most of the time, but sometimes it wakes.

When it’s awake, it  lets out a growl.

Then, like the crinkled face of a baby before it bursts into tears,

it will bear and impress upon the beholder–

an ominous presence,

not quite screaming, but not quite calm.

Fuzz.

My Crazy World

7:30 AM, I enter the Computing Center and heard loud, shocking beeps–someone before me has tripped the alarm. I disarmed it quickly as I do each morning when I go and open the center, and I suspected it might have been the African American Janitor around the corner who didn’t arm the code correctly before leaving. I knew that a police officer will arrive shortly and question me about the matter and sure enough, in 10 seconds, an officer arrived. I told him how I had arrived with the alarm ringing, and he wrote down my name just in case. Then, he said unexpectingly, “Must’ve been that friggin janitor out there”. I was speechless.

For a long time, I always conceived the world of very intelligent, rational people that were courteous and respectful to everyone. This incident early in the morning took me by surprise, and by night, I listened to the Daily Show and watched some unbelievable clips of the right-wing news media calling the Obama adminstration a “tyranny”, that, for the sake of “protecting our freedom” we must oppose Obama and his policies. While I don’t consider myself completely neutral and knowledgable about politics, I was simply and utterly blown away by how absurd, callous, and outright inane some of these comments were. Didn’t they have any shred of understanding? This is NATIONAL TELEVISION, for God’s sakes. It is already quite unbelievable hearing people talk like this in private, let alone on television.

I can rant about this all day, but to get to the point, I wanted to point out how differently people conceive of the world. Why do I find these kinds of things utterly repulsive and dishonest, while others find it morally uplifting or inspiring? How can a news commentator be compelled to say something like this? Obviously, being a home grown California all my life, I probably treat my liberal leanings as a de facto kind of national sentiment. I obviously need to go out into the world more. In my life, should I attempt to communicate my ideas with others in hopes of changing some of these ideologies? How much right do I have to do this? I am quite convinced that my current views on politics is pretty sound, but don’t all people think the philosophy and outlook they developed on politics are sound? No one will advocate their messages as they do if they genuinely know or believe that their understanding is wrong. So what then? How do I know I’m ‘right’, and what objective measure will I be comparing my perception to?

Crazy, crazy world.

My relationship with Engineering

Back in 7th grade, I was engaged to the field of engineering. I bought a 1,200 dollar computer (top of the line, 1.3 gigahertz pentium 4 at the time), invested a couple hundred dollars on 3D design books, and spent countless days and nights drawing products on my new computer. I didn’t have a teacher who taught me any of the design work, so I plopped down with a 1000 page “3d studio max bible” and tried to learn my way through books. Once, I remembered having sat 7 hours straight, measuring and graphing the dimensions of a dissected floppy disk in order to recreate it exactly on the computer with my Pro-Engineering program. I wasn’t kidding when I said I was engaged to the field of engineering.

For a long time I’ve wanted to be a mechanical engineer, and I was introduced to this field by a friend of mine who I considered to be a big brother. With time, however, I began to realize the limitations of being an engineer. For one thing, I didn’t want to be planted in front of a computer for 10 hours a day, busily drawing objects with a mouse cursor as a chisel and a keyboard as clay. I liked people, and I would have much rather lived a little more poorly than dedicate my life to the computer. Also, I started hearing about China and its army of engineers that can design 10x faster and are willing to receive less than 1/8 the pay. I figured if I was already unsatisfied with the high salary, why would I think twice the prospects of high wages for engineering is in decline? Two years in the shallow end of the engineering world, and I was out running butt-naked for the world that is the humanities.

It didn’t take me long to fall in love with the liberal arts. I enjoyed riding the thrill of  a good action novel just as equally as I did mapping the coordinates of my invented scooter-backpack. I liked love, death, burlesque humor, and everything that is in between in the mixed salad of human experiences. I loved little, cliched words; I loved grandiloquent, ostentatiously flashy words. But most importantly, I loved taking these stories, these words for myself. I wanted to be a more precise and witty wordsmith so I can constantly arm myself with a battery of exotic words and toss newly constructed aphorisms like July 4th firecrackers. That is what I wanted. That is what I still want. And as long as this want exists, I will always chase after the elusive art that is language.

Today, however, I found my attraction to the sciences re-kindled in the form of learning about network system adminstration. Perhaps it was because I had become so removed from it for so long, but for the first 5 weeks of my decal class on system administration, I was completely lost and bored out of my wits. I fell asleep consistently each lecture, and left the class carrying nothing but a bag of jargon and some empty computer commands. Six weeks of this ritual, and I had enough. I would have dropped the class, but it was too late. I had to stick through the class,  so today, I armed myself with a cup of medium sized coffee and truly, seriously listened to lecture. Three hours later, I walked out of the computer lab awed, amazed, and transformed by the experience I had setting up my own remote network. It was like being in a time capsule, and my attempts at solving the problems that have eluded me for so long have finally begun to see light.

I see the light!

But now, as I type, I am much to tired. My efforts at memorializing this wonderful experience of working with computer science by writing about it (an essentially ‘humanities’-type endeaver), feels  ironic and unwieldly. My words do not seem to want to glorify my re-engagement with engineering. No matter how I try (as I am trying right now), I can’t seem to express myself poetically or coherently. It is as if my words are revolting against me, refusing to prostitute itself to the whims of my intention. Because of the difficulty and frustration I am facing right now in trying to expressing myself but doing so very poorly, I will go to sleep and let my “engineering side” and “humanities side” duke it out in the vast landscapes of my dreams.

Outcast

Outside my window, I hear the confused cries of a homeless man. Like a animal crying into the night, his garbled sentences are delivered to the cool darkness, where it finds an audience in the passerby who quicken their pace as they pass the noise.

The voice doesn’t stop. It keep going. And going.

It keeps up its incoherent oozing, like blood from a wound, and it refuses to stop. It continues its plea for attention, perhaps out of rage, perhaps out of misunderstanding. In it I hear the roiling ripples in a cesspool. It penetrates my windows, finding its way into my room, breaking my concentration as I try to study for a midterm tomorrow. Is this voice, this man, a member left behind by society? Or is his incessant, uncompromising voice a mere nuisance?

I had to put on my earphones to find out.

Appreciatng Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan is like a taboo name at Berkeley. To even mention Reagan is to pull up a history of violent policies that have brought upon the destruction of hundreds of cohesive communities throughout the United States, policies that allowed for corporations to exercise private agendas over eminent domain laws that protected small town jobs. Reaganomics has for itself a notoriety matched only by historical events of the most odious kind. After learning about some of the consequences of the Reagan era, I also found myself contemptuous of Reagan in a very knee-jerk, reactionary way, despite never knowing or hearing much about him before as a historical figure.

For some reason, I decided to look up Ronald Reagan today and parts of his legacy  (okay, perhaps it was because I was procrastinating with my paper). For one thing, I was able to actually see and hear the man instead of recognizing him as some corporate, conservative symbol devoid of all humanity. After hearing him speak, I saw why people call him “the great communicator”. The interesting thing is, Reagan was actually a Democrat in his youth, and he voted for FDR four times back in the day, only to convert to a Republican later on and revert all of FDR’s work when he became President himself.

What I was most interested from this entire ‘excursion’, if you will, is Ronald Reagan as a person. Ideology-wise, I’m still not sure I know about everything that Reagan stands for and why he stood by them. However, from hearing his personality through his humor and seeing his love and dedication to his wife Nancy, I really do kind of wish I had a chance to speak with him and shake his hand. To just kind of demonstrate how ignorant I was with politics, I never knew he passed away in 2004 until I looked him up today.

Now, some people will say that it was his personality and character that made him so influential in manipulating the American public into accepting his personal and political agendas. I completely agree with this criticism, as it is both justified and quite standard in politics. However, politics aside, I want to be able to have the freedom of being able to shake his hand without being demonized (as Obama was attacked and criticized for earlier on in his campaign). I want to be able to chat with Reagan about his life and how he has come to make the decisions he did in his life. Because I have faith in my values and what I learned, I know I can  speak confidently with Reagan and listen to him without fear of beng manipulated” into becoming a right wing nut job. Hearing the other side out is not a sign of weakness.

If only I had been born a decade earlier…

Then I go to sleep

Butt tired, the arm are melting into the world that is sleep.

What is this kingdom of sleep, and why must it hold hegemony over the lives of people in life? A mind that is completely dark and quiet is merely reactive instead of active, is easily fascinated but unsure of what gives an activity its meat.

The panel of past volunteers sit as if on trial, on trial for some misdemeaur for have peered into the office and taking out osme material.

But the shoulders will not follow, and slowly, the fingers type with difficulty the final period.

then I go to sleep.

Fliering

As I went around the campus today putting up fliers on the week of student government elections, I realized just how crazy mad this whole process is. I had a bunch of little modest quarter sheet fliers in my hands, but the longer I stared at the bulltein board I’m supposed to be posting on, the more hopeless I felt. Not only was I outsized, I was outnumbered (wall was filled), outcolored (mine was black and white), and completely overwhelmed by the collage of bulging, multivariegated masses of “vote-for-me” fliers.

As I contemplated how I was going to ease my little quarter-sheet into this chaos, I thought a little about the “culture” of spamvertising in the form of putting up a ton of fliers all over the place. For one thing, as I was putting up my flier, I realized that many other fliers were covered by people who came after. A Culture Dance event is succeeded by the beaming face of a senator, who is in turn overtaken by a senator of the rival political party, who is covered by  a comedy play. Usually, I would look through all the fliers and find the ones that have already expired (past the date of the event) in order to take them down and put up my own. However, all these events that I see vying for bulletin space are happening this week, and none of them relented toward the others.

I knew I didn’t have the audacity to slam my little quarter-sheet over the palimpsest of posters as my predecessors had done before me, so I tried looking for the little loose edges on the sides and slip my flier in. I didn’t have to use any staples, as all I had to do was find a crevice made from the other posters and stick my right on top, letting it poke off of the bulletin like a little white mohawk. It was interesting because I then started to think, “What if I were in the situation of the senators and had to fight tooth and claw for the attention of my fellow peers? Would I be polite as I am now with my quarter-sheets?” This led to an internal debate about natural selection, which led to another discussion about the reality of human competition, which led to the question in the meaning and effacacity of ethics and morality. Will I be moral if my circumstances compel me to be cut-throat? Who then is in control, and who then is at fault: the systemic processes or myself?

Fliering can be educational indeed.

Networking 101

I attended a networking workshop today by Peggy Klaus, and as I expected, there was a lot of hands on work. (If it was all theory, I would actually be skeptical of how effective the workshop is).  To begin with, we defined “networking” as “the building or maintaining of informal relationships, especially with people whose friendship could lead to opportunities for personal and business advantage”. I did not like this description, especially because of its heavy emphasis on “personal and business advantage”. I know that for the pragmatic philosophers out there, my natual aversion for building relationships on the premise of gaining an advantage is naive, but I do still believe in that not all relationships necessarily have to be for instrumental ends. In order to immerse myself in this workshop without being perpetually biased by my prejudice against the definition of “networking”, I decided to continue to use the word “networking”, but strip it of its business connotations and treat it solely as a method for meeting more people. Sounds redundant on a pragmatic level, but I believe that there is a fundamental difference in its execution if the intent behind the action is different, and for that, I am willing to make that clarification.

I will now discuss a few of the main principles presented. The first is to BE SPECIFIC. This was a big one, and it was reiterated very often throughout the session. When people from the audience were called on, people offered vague descriptions using butt words like meeting an “engaging”speaker, having a “good relationship”, and feeling a need to “defend my reputation”. Instead of spelling out the specifics, these generalizing nouns encompassed so much that they embodied connotative feelings but really meant nothing in substance. The “engaging speaker”, for instance, was engaging because he made eye contact, had a lot of physical gestures, and good voice. According to research cited in the talk, 55% of what people are most moved by in a speech is PHYSCIAL (gesture, contact, motion, etc), 38% is voicing (tone, inflection, pitch, speed, pause), and only 7% is content.

Taking this research, we come to another point in networking often overlooked: be wary of how you present yourself. Remeber, 93% of a talk/lecture is based on physical attributes and tone, leaving little room for content. Impressions can be formed in as quick as 7 seconds, and after which a person will begin to process and evaluate another. Many times, however, when people are engaging others and talking with people, the central focus is placed in content (“What am I going to say”) rather than in performance (“How am I going to present it”). This observation points to a fundamental human flaw, and that is being unaware of how we are being perceived by others. Recognizing this component of projecting oneself and being sensitive to how we come off will pay dividends, not only when engaging with other people, but also in any other social situation.

The last major principle is to act as if you are at your best, regardless of how you’re feeling. This component takes a bit of self-discipline, but it is also intimately tied to the concern about how people are perceived by others. A very, very powerful tool that we were given to overcome our inertia of presenting our best self is a practice called “Going over the top”. This is almost like a “warm-up”, per se, of getting ready to talk in front of people. What you do, is you find a secluded place, make sure it’s absolutely clear of people, and then you totally freak with excitement and let passion jet out of your every pores by waving greatly, jumping, or running around with high excitement. This practice sounds inane and plenty silly, but what it actually does it that it pushes you over your comfort zone, forcing you into an extreme state. Afterwards, when you talk at a less ‘extreme’ state, you sound more energetic and excited then you were went you didn’t do the “going over the top” exercise. It was a powerful tool.

In sum, I wanted to conclude that I am against the idea of “Networking” as a form of business lingo stripped down to its most pragmatic function of “gaining personal or business advantage”. Instead, I focused on the tools involved with becoming better at meeting other people, including noticing how you come off with others, doing some pre-meeting preparation work to facilitate your presenting yourself (both content and performance), and then practicing as often as possible.