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I’m sitting in my dorm in Hong Kong thinking of posting and staring out the window at the hazy sky that reminds me very much of Vancouver.  You know, the gray-about-to-rain looking kind of skies.  I can’t decide what to write about.  Challenges of healthy living at dorms?  School stuff? The exchange student partying habits?  Extracurricular activities?  Budgeting? Homesickness? I can’t decide.

I made a friend here who is from HEC in Quebec.  He says it must be a Vancouverite thing, the indecision. You know those times when you hang out with a bunch of people but no one wants to make a decision on what to do?  I have a friend from home who is taking a semester off in HK and when we all hung out, he said it’s not indecision, it’s being considerate.  I think it’s just personal indecision on my part.  Is indifference the same as indecision or just an excuse for it?

People who return from exchange often say they learned so much about themselves and the world.  For me, even though it’s only been a month, it’s the meeting people all the time factor that is affecting me most.  You can’t call up your best friends to go out when you’re lonely or rely on someone to be on MSN to fill your social gap (time differences boo.)  The business student teachings also kick in and tell me to go out there and “network.”  Get bored, meet people more often than I would at home, and then I’m plunged into the awesome cosmo of knowledge and insight that is the bigger world.

I met up with an “acquaintance-friend” (those people who you would say are your friends but you don’t know them all that well) who quit school to move back to Hong Kong and work in his family’s business. I learned he is very ambitious. When I hear about what he has been doing and what he wants to do it makes me wonder if I should be ambitious too and build great dreams risking failure or just be calm and content and stable?  At times I wonder if there is even a decision there.  I guess it’s more like I don’t have a picture for my future. Like its an empty frame hanging in white space.  Maybe I’m uninspired.  I love ambitious people, I always learn so much from them.

Go be ambitious, you’re young, just do it.
(September 12, 2011: Mid-Autumn Festival, Victoria Park)  

Whilst talking to my friend I noticed two feelings that young ambitious people tend to tell me about:

1. We want to do something great and we know that we can, we just don’t know what it is yet.

2. We either hold fears that someday we will be [age] and we won’t be where we want to be or we are already feeling like we are not the person who we thought we would be by now.

Do you think this is universal? It is striking how extremely similar my friend’s feelings were to other young ambitious people I know.

“If only I had a dream, then I’d chase it like mad” I would tell myself.  People my age with dreams tell me “if only I knew for sure this is what I want.”  I’d like to hear what someone who knows for sure has to say.

Windy days here are wonderful =)

All the worries of my days in university so far have all been fixated around time.  There’s so much time spent on things like commuting, breaks that are too long but not long enough between classes, time spent on recovering energy from commuting too long (which by the way doesn’t make any  but I still do it.)  And the procrastination.  Oh my all the procrastination.  By the time the weekend comes along I still don’t feel like I have enough time and then the weekend passes like it never even came.

Yesterday Robert Herjavec, one of the Dragon’s from CBC’s The Dragon’s Den came to speak about what mostly seemed like inspiration.  He told us a story about a time when Arnold Schwarzenegger went to speak at a university and a student was upset about the tuition increase proposals.  The student said that a tuition increase would mean that he would have to get a job.  Arnold said so what?  The student then argues that getting a job means less time to study, and he’ll do bad in school and he won’t have any sleep (I bet that sounds familiar).  Arnold asks him how many hours he needs to sleep.  Boy replies 8.  Arnold says 6 is enough.  Boy says 6 is not enough for him.  Arnold says “sleep faster.”

Were you waiting for something deeper?

Herjavec’s presentation was indeed deep, that was just something he said that I really wanted to share.

Anyway, the majority of the presentation was about achieving success.  He said that if you’re poor, or if you’re ugly, or if you’re just stuck with some bad dispositions, of course it’s going to be harder for you.  And then the next point he made stuck with me so much, the only equal playing field we have is the fact that we all have the same amount of time.

Think about someone you admire, or someone you envy.  What are they doing with their time that you aren’t?  Why aren’t you?

That is so easy to say but it’s not like I’m satisfied with every action I make.  But I’m working on it, maybe it’s all a part of growing up.  (…Am I going to be 30 years old some day and still being saying stuff like “it’s a part of growing up?”)

From a distant perspective, school starting on the 2nd week of September always makes me feel good. Like as if I’m cheating time for a longer summer. However, in the moment right now, it feels more like an extended funeral with 5 days of mourning. Or perhaps sort of like how I would expect myself to feel if someone told me I was dying and I was out to suck some marrow of life, except I’m not dying so I laze around with the intent to suck the marrow out of life.

Did I have plans for my summer at home? Yes. Did I fulfill them? Not all of them. Did I attempt to? Yes… sort of. Will I keep trying? Well no, the summer is over. What keeps me from doing these things even though summer is over? …

Note to self: just because it’s not summer doesn’t mean you can’t do all those things you “wanted to do but didn’t have time for” over the school year. Key word = prioritize. What makes you happy? Long run and short run.

So how am I spending my last cherished Saturday morning? (Whatever happened to Fox Box!?)

I’m looking at pictures of nebulae (nebula…s).

And for some reason I’m getting a slight motion sickness kind of feeling when I look at them.

I get this same feeling when I’m on Google Maps looking at things like mountains or bodies of water in satellite view.

I guess I’m just not cut out to be an alien.

Headless warrior is a great plan B though.

Before the days of university I have never heard anyone use the word “keener.”  Now it’s everywhere.  It had to come from somewhere though right?  So someone’s high school must have used “keener.”

Were you a “keener” user?

How I dream for the day when someone calls me a keener and seriously means it.  At this rate it is a lost hope, as are my grades.

Okay I really shouldn’t be saying that.  Yesterday when I was hanging out with a smart friend of mine I realized, the mindset of especially smart people are very different, maybe it is why they are so smart.  She got a midterm back  and it was the first time she had ever done so bad.  Some of you may be thinking “pft probably over exaggerating one of those ‘Asian fails’ again.  Those over achievers =(” but no, it was a genuine way below fail, fail.

And she told me, whilst half speaking to herself: “OK I’LL STUDY AND ON THE FINAL I WILL KNOW EVERY SINGLE QUESTION!!”

Shocking.

To me anyway.  I’m sure she meant it in 100% of the meaning of “every.” When I fail or do bad I just honestly tell myself “I’ll work hard and seriously work to the best of my abilities for the next one” but I have never gone for the “I will know it all” mentality.

I really found it amazing how she seriously meant she would aim for it all.  Could this be a defining factor from the normal and the brilliant?

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I did more exploring yesterday too.

The subbasement of Korener.  What a death trap.

It’s all quiet, you’re lucky if you see a few lively souls around.  You’re walking down the wide middle aisle but your wet sneakers are squeaking across the linoleum tiles so you decide to turn into a smaller carpeted lane.

You don’t really know where you’re heading as every path seems to start looking the same.  You start walking faster hoping to find a way out.  CREAK. What was that? You turn around hoping to find that someone stepped on one of those metal things that enter into the shelves.  No one.  You face forward again and you suddenly realize the shelves are moving on their own.

You panic, you duck between nearest shelves.

Ok this one was way too narrow to fit completely inside.  So you go for the historic Vietnam section. You lean against the the old books trying to catch your heart beat.  Suddenly you realize the walls are closing in on you.  You’re in the midway point between the two ends of the shelf.  You waste 4 seconds trying to decide which side you run towards.  You try to yell out and even though the library is so quiet the layers of shelves block out the sound.

But you’re a keener and you escaped.

Those shelves really scare me though.  I have a hard time walking between them slowly and calmly.

I’m sorry I haven’t posted in a while.  I couldn’t think of anything to talk about.

So on the bus to school on Thursday, I asked myself why I didn’t have anything to say.  It hit me that the school life has come to the point where I officially deem myself “settled in” even though I still feel like I have alot to catch up on.

Rather than telling you my daily schedule, I will share with you these things that I find are consistent in my day other than the classes that I have to go to.

There is always…

@9-10: moments of staring at people on the bus and wondering what they’re thinking and where they’re going.

@11-12: something to catch up on, something to study for, some meeting to be at.  There is always something.  The perpetual stress… but even stress can be something to get used to.

@lunch: distracted by things to check out at the SUB like that scarf stand or the AMS art gallery.

@the class after I ate: a moment of dozing off, followed by a moment of “how long was I out?”, followed by a moment of “I’m so screwed for this class.”

@ another class: repeat the 3rd moment of the previous.

@a class where I have friends: something inappropriate to laugh at.

@…a random time: some place to explore.  Like going to the 2nd floor of the SUB and seeing what the rooms are booked for that day.  Man, I feel like such a creeper.

@…a random place: seeing something I didn’t notice before

^ the SUB 2nd floor. (Dun dun dun, are they straight or misaligned? It’s an optical illusion~~)

@Angus or that road between Irving and Chemistry: someone handing me something.

@sometime near the end of the day: doing something stupid.  For instance on Friday: walking backwards against the wind for a couple hundred meters.  It’s warmer that way. Really. (Don’t worry, it’s much less embarrassing when you’re not doing it by yourself… and at 5:30 with no one around)

@bus ride home: something to talk about with friend… usually something that questions the way people are.

@Friday: the desperate feeling to hang out with someone in hopes of recovering the sanity you lost over the week.