the light

just some thoughts

ooo so i upgraded to wordpress 2.5 oooo. i even updated a plugin to work with wordpress 2.5 oooo

and now the visual editor works on safari. ooooo.

back in boston! i had quite a trip. after i left san francisco on monday i spent the week at kate’s home near philly. we left to new york on thursday to visit marcus in the upper west side. some other ppl were there too, kemi clifton, justen anjuli, laura harris (full namer). we went to this (gay?) bar near marcus’s place and i did some slightly embarrassing things. like sing really loudly and dance solo. luckily i didn’t let myself sing karaoke, but anjuli and marcus did lol. too bad i don’t always have a video camera with me, it was a cute sight. kate and i promptly left new york yesterday. we could have stayed another day but we were so homesick.

it’s (almost) official. i’ll be moving to san francisco to work at dropbox. things are happening so fast. i guess i went over a lot of my insecure thoughts that relate to this in my last post. san francisco will be nice and getting away from mit will be nice but i’ll be so alone. i’m not sure if that is the right thing to do. i thought about tricking everyone i love to move there but i dunno if that’s even worth it. it doesn’t seem like my permanent place, maybe that will change. once your financially independent any place is fine right? ugh i am just going to need rurik and kate. lol or kate and rurik. there are others too.

i also keep thinking that my life here is good too but it’s not. my life is too occupied. i don’t have enough time to go visit friends or time to work on my hobbies or time to go on vacations. because mit is intense, or college is intense. will things be different in san francisco? i think i’ll be working a lot too but at least i’ll be programming and setting my own goals. i’m excited about doing lots of programming. some people think programming is a chore but i love it. writing readable programs and quality software is one of those more rewarding things in life, lol. so yeah my life might slightly improve.

ugh it’s just crazy to imagine having a different life. suddenly. and without kate? has anyone ever been in this position before? what do you do

san francisco

is prettier than i imagined. i keep telling people that it’s so pretty but i really have no other way to describe it. it probably is the least depressing and cleanest city i’ve ever been to. i’m staying in arash’s and drew’s apartment and they have this really nice view of the san francisco bay. i mean incredible view.

i keep thinking about when i move here. right now i’m only here for a weekend but i am getting concerned about losing my friends. how do people do it? go from place to place and fall out of close contact with their good friends. what can i really hope for? random visits every now and then. maybe some kind of short arranged reunion. none of that seems like an adequate substitute. the same applies to my family. so how will i live? i always think about that but then i ask myself how i would live if i didn’t come. things would be just as bad.

i guess i could theoretically start my own company, website or something but then i would probably just move here anyway. would i? i don’t even know what i would do. i certainly would not be happier working for some large company, that is for sure. i wouldn’t be happier being a grad student without any other prospects and i don’t have the ambition to become a professor. i feel like this is a test that early adulthood performs on you. it’s like, i have nothing else to do except what i want but what do i want?

and the answer is repeatedly the same thing. i want to be within close range of my family and friends. i want to be part of a larger community of people and meet new people more or less often. i want to live somewhere where i can get everything i need by just taking a stroll or somewhere with lots of nice parks around. what else? eventually i just die so that’s all i really want while i’m alive.

i went to this party last night. it was the justin.tv one year anniversary. it was interesting. usually at parties i am calm and comfortable but i really wasn’t this time. i wasn’t nervous but i didn’t feel comfortable. i guess in some ways i just felt out of place. what do you talk about when you are in a room full of web startup people? lol i guess that raises the more general question of what should you even talk about with people in general? and i think the answer is that you’ll find out when you’re drunk. i dunno i just had the weirdest feeling. it was like everyone there was just like me except they weren’t like me, maybe it was that we had all chosen a similar path but we were all fundamentally different as people. probably not fundamentally different, most ppl there were nerds who started websites before they went throught puberty. i fit into that category pretty well.

i’ve been reading about spectral methods and fluid dynamics lately. so interesting. it turns out the majority of ppl at mit have taken or are taking classes in fluid mechanics. so basically everyone can teach me about it lol. course six is so bad. it’s even worse now. they should warn ppl who already know how to program to not do course six and instead do course 18 if they like math or one of the sciences if they are into science. almost every single discipline requires people knowing how to code and you can do really interesting stuff if you can program what you learn. try your ideas out on a computer. whatever. haskell is seriously once again my favorite language. my next web app will definitely be in haskell.

update 3/26/08: you can see me dancing at the justin.tv party, so embarrassing lol.

when i had no game

so today after yoga i saw this girl from my yoga class waiting by the door of the zesiger center. she was making eye contact with me and i started to think that maybe she was going to approach me.

she didn’t. but after that it made me think about when i was younger and what i did when i liked someone. it’s hard to describe it now. i guess whenever there was someone in my class that i liked that i didn’t know i would always think of these over dramatic situations where it would be a perfect moment for someone to fall in love with me.

for instance it would be after school. all the kids are outside on the grass, talking, playing around, waiting for their parents to come pick them up. what would she be doing? would she be with her friends? would she talk to me if i asked her to in front of her friends? am i even that bold? or maybe she would be alone. it would be perfect. i would start walking toward her, not nervous, not scared. and if she saw me, maybe a nervous smile. what would we talk about? would i have nothing to say, would she lose interest immediately? would there be any chance of me actually saying something that she could relate to? life would be perfect then. all those little possibilities, having my self-worth based on whether or not some girl in elementary school liked me. lol.

i thought about all those old thoughts i used to have. would i still do any of those things if i liked someone now? would i wait for them outside wherever they worked or went to school. finally realize the moment i had been dreaming of. the guts??? would i even have the guts now? or are all those days over? i guess it was always freakish to plan out approaching a girl on some perfect occasion and expect that it would blossom into something more. i guess what i learned over these years is that that isn’t the way to go about it, girls just think you are desperate or freakish or stalkerish no one ever admires that you were trying to create one of those perfect moments. i still think it’s romantic. my heart beat faster then.

i hope that one day someone dreams of a perfect moment with me and actually creates it. yeah, instead of money or something else creating ur perfect life, how about that one moment?? just being in love with another person. that’s how things used to be for me. i always just wanted to be in love. what else could be more important? i think it’s true.

my room should be clean

but it isn’t :(

so much work this week. so many deadlines. so many.

i guess i’m not that worried.

chiropractic is a gift

for the past month and a half (around the time of my peruvian curse) i’ve been having some pretty strange back pain. two to three weeks after that my leg started to feel consistently tingly and not really numb but funny. at the time i wasn’t sure what all of this meant. i guess i attributed it to being sick and other things. anyway i have yet to recover after two months and my neck, back, and leg numbness were starting to worry me. over the summer my entire family was seeing this chiropractic doctor and he enlightened us to the importance of having a healthy spine. basically your brain uses your spine to send signals to every part of the body. if the spine is somehow deformed it constricts the nerves that run through it and deteriorates the efficiency of your nervous system. it’s subtle but it happens. all your organs need these signals, kidneys, stomach, liver, heart, penis, intestine. everything is listening to the signals from your brain.

i went to a doctor who specializes in chiropractic today. i was looking for one who was more holistic and natural and wasn’t about “quick fixes” someone who was interested in long term recovery. i found someone in between, he wasn’t all about this natural herbal holistic stuff but he wasn’t an insurance supported doctor either.

so he checked me up and told me that my upper spine was twisted left and right in four places. he said that probably accounted for my upper back pain. i told him about my leg being numb and how when i keep my head turned to the right it immediately gets numb. he did all these physical tests on the ability of my different extremities. then he did the most amazing thing. he made me try to keep my thumb and pinky stuck together while he tried to pull them apart. on my right hand there was no way i could keep them together. on my left hand i didn’t have much of a problem. he was confused and a little troubled and he said “hmm seems like you might have a pinched nerve in your neck.” he cracked my neck in this really LOUD way and tried the test again. instantly i was able to do it. not only that, later i noticed that my TMJ was completely gone. amazing!!! he said that the pinched nerve in my neck probably was the reason for my leg numbness. we’ll see how that works out.

a lot of people are skeptical when it comes to chiropractic. i don’t blame them. in cases like mine where traditional doctors keep telling you there is nothing wrong, yet you know something is wrong and you’ve done everything to fix it (in my case yoga, sugar-free alcohol-free vegetable-rich diet) then i think you should try everything. clifton pointed out that maybe he pulled a con on me and pulled my fingers apart harder on my right hand so i would be convinced that he could heal me. perhaps except i didn’t notice a difference in the strength he used to pull apart my fingers. who knows. just like i said, i think it’s important to try everything and so far i am having good results :)

if chiropractic ends up really working i think i am going to study it for a couple of years, to aid my quest in becoming a healer. woo

every1 is on meds

so i thought i was the only one with medical/psychological problems. boy was i wrong! lol i’m just the only one who talks about it more or less openly with my friends. all my friendies keep it on the dl.

that doesn’t bug me really. i think it’s important to talk to your friends when you are having issues like that. those issues affect your everyday life and your “happiness level.” i think it’s helpful to get out your feelings and fears when you are suffering from some kind of health issue. lol at least it’s helpful for me.

every1 is on meds. secret meds. hidden meds. i guess it’s obvious that i think the entire american pharmaceutical industry is evil.

so i decided that i want to be a part time herbalist. i think that is the word. maybe naturalist? no no no the word is healer. i would love to be a healer. i would love it if people came to me and were like “i am having this problem what should i do?” i would be like “take some of this daily, rub this here, avoid this” and then soon enough they would be healed.

i’ve read a lot of things about how strenuous yoga can heal health problems. lots of different kinds, cancer probably included. i want to read more about that. for now the only two natural medicines i know are cayenne pepper and garlic. they are amazing!!

hahaha

lol that last post i wrote was stupid as fuck lolllll

anyway if you want to laugh for hours here is my old website 

how i turned a busy day into a fun day

so really no one needs help on how to do this. when i lived with este he would always quote his mother about how being young and busy is much better than being old and bored. i  am pretty sure that is true. being young and busy can be so stressful but it’s better than having no life. blah blah

anyway last thursday i had a really really busy day. i had to run so many dumb little errands and i was under a lot of pressure to finish my 6.111 lab before the weekend started (space faces had two shows lol, oh yeah we also HAD to practice at some pt). to give you some insight into doing 6.1** labs, they usually take a fucking long time. sometimes up to 20 or 30 hours. anyway by thursday at 5pm i had spent virtually no time in lab (although i had written all my code) and i felt pretty much fucked. initially nothing worked and i had no idea why. at six dugan calls me up and we decide that we pretty much have to practice, so we spent two hours doin that and i was back in lab by 8:30. anyway i thought i knew why nothing worked and i tried fixing it but still nothing worked. it wasn’t until 11:30pm that my thing was half working and i rejoiced. i made a lot of n00b errors. mostly never mix combinational logic with input mixed from old values of its output (sounds weird but verilog does this type of stuff).

that was just the day in total. by itself it doesn’t sound fun (at least not very fun, although being in lab hacking on a project is fun sometimes) but i made it fun. earlier in the day i was just runnin around running errands all over mit. i probably went everywhere within the main connection of buildings. i saw so many different ppl going to class coming from class. i saw so many random grad students stuck in their offices working away or arguing with their professors. i even saw strange old people who for some reason when you look at them you can tell that they have a lot of power within mit. one group of old people that i saw were 2 old ladies and this old man. one old lady was saying “oh my he was so rude and brutish, it pained me to be in his presence.” the other old lady “who are you talking about?” the first old lady “the black fellow” despite the best efforts of many, racism does exist at mit.

you can hear a lot of these conversations. people talk about the strangest and most embarrassing things with their friends.