Final Projects at a Coding Bootcamp

We've hit the final sprint at Makersquare, which means we've been plopped into groups of 4 with whom we'll be coding a magnificent app that will represent the culmination of our last 12 weeks in the program.

Group work has been presenting its own set of challenges, not the least of which was the sinus infection that came from out of left field and knocked me out of the race for almost the entirety of the planning stage of our app. I presented and fleshed out my ideas the best I could from my bed, but there's only so much I could do when I'm rolling around in fever dreams.

I've noticed the primary obstacle to us not only getting something done, but getting something cool done, is our group's hesitance to confront eachother. We were going to work on a really interesting project that was very well fleshed out, but as the idea got developed further, arguments arose over implementation and what sort of functionality would be added, and the idea was tossed out for an idea defined as "git data." What's the app do? "It, uh, gets data from github and sorts it for the user." Neat...

Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of cool paths we can go down with our app idea, but I feel like we're selling ourselves short by not just having a good old throw-down on the functional details. There's nothing wrong with emotions rising occasionally - that just means people are passionate about what's happening. A teammate told me today "I feel like the team doesn't feel invested in the project." I agree, and that's likely because none of us has a dog in this race. Nobody has a pet feature they're keen to work on implementing, or a hot idea to make our app wizz-bang incredible. We avoided confrontation and picked a thing that was just ill-defined enough to be palatable to everyone. Luckily we've all become aware of this and have a couple brainstorming sessions scheduled, but it was an important learning point.

We've been going down a react / redux / webpack route. At first tedious and needlessly obtuse, I think we're all adapting well, and it certainly won't hurt to be sticking those technologies on our resume at the end of it all. Something that's helped tremendously is pair programming throughout the beginning phase of the project, to allow everyone to get a hand on each piece of the pie and get a taste for what went into making it.

Watching the Warriors vs Rockets. Not a tense day at all. Nope. 

A small group of us have been heading out on Saturdays for basketball, which as a complete noob has been a fun experience. I may not do well on the court but just doing something outside the classroom with these people I spend every hour of every day with is refreshing. Especially considering my total lack of any other friends here in San Francisco, it's nice to go out, compete, and decompress. I thought following a strict workout plan would be enough to cover my 'get out of the office' needs but after a particularly wild Saturday night I'm convinced it takes that small extra step. Walks help, too.

Surviving a Coding Bootcamp - Nearly Halfway Done at Makersquare

Life at Makersquare has fairly normalized. There's not much in the way of ego-shattering surprises anymore, though every moment has stayed fresh. Our cohort has settled into a comfortable familiarity, the short time we've known eachother counteracted by the fact that we spend nearly every minute of every day together.

Saturdays we're off at 530, which one would expect means a mad rush for the door to do, god, anything but hang out at the office we're planted in for >60 hours a week. Yet, people keep on coding, grab beers, pull out the cards, and hang out. What might have been dreary has become a sort of second home, or in my case even more of a home than anywhere else in California. Sometimes we'll throw a movie or tv show up on a projector, sometimes we'll kick back and LAN some minecraft, sometime we'll crack beers in the kitchen and play bananagrams. It makes the Makersquare office cozy, a place where not only do we smoosh as much Javascript into our heads as we can, but also a place we can look forward to coming to. I've learned to associate the sight of the building in the morning with the taste of free bagels, and have already Pavlov'd myself into not feeling hungry until I walk onto Mission street, 2 hours after I've woken up.

We get 2 hour lunches Tue, Thu, and Sat, which is ostentatiously for working out. By some miracle of discipline, I've managed to make it to the gym for each of those days, making the last few weeks the most consistent of my life. I believe these workouts are a critical component of my ability to not only stay positive and on my game here, but to succeed at all. I'm not sure what would happen if I was struck with a bout of that weird depressive sleepiness I get when I don't have any physical activity in my life, but I can't imagine it would be conducive to an education. Having it in the middle of the day is just icing on the cake. Biking four miles a day uphill both ways (it seems) certainly doesn't hurt, either.

I don't get much in the way of extra coding time, as my commute has me leaving the house at 7 and getting here at as late as 830, and getting home between 9 and 10 depending on the mood of the MUNI. So far it hasn't seemed to be much of an issue, but with a cumulative assessment coming up, I'm striking around for times I can squeeze in just a bit more work. So far all my free time has been filled with trying to figure out the new Google Cloud nonsense (how to Node.js? please send help) and catching up with the new season of House of Cards.

It's been boxed lunches every day, which probably is good for my health or whatever, but mostly is friendly to my wallet. It's been a lot of whole chickens thrown in the oven for about an hour, shredded, and added to some broccoli. I'll cook better when I've got the time and money. I have been dabbling in baking bread, which I can tell will quickly become an addiction once I have the time to feed it.

This week has been a lot of backend request handling, locking down our understanding of asynchronous coding, and databases.

4 weeks in at Makersquare coding bootcamp

Week 4 about to end here, incredible really because we're just about a few weeks away from another incoming group of juniors. In that time, we've sprinted from bare-bones javascript through ES6, data structures, using Node.js, and are hitting databases.

Being in the midst of it makes it difficult to gain a perspective on how much I've learned in the past few weeks, but I can recognize many changes. For the first time in my life, I don't find myself dragging my feet on the way out of the door at home, or jumping up from my desk the second the workday has ended. This even though we end at 8 and are technically working >60hr weeks. I find myself approaching problems from a much more organized perspective than ever before. If only I had the note-taking ability I have now back in college.

Paired programming having possibly the greatest effect. Learning a great deal about how I work with others, the kinds of responses my behavior garner. Getting better at talking about the code I'm writing, the plans I have, sharing it with someone else, working together to find solutions and teach eachother. Learning to identify what's important in a certain exercise, how to manage time to achieve those important things.

Home not getting much easier. First roommate, Zhou, subjecting Kailin to daily verbal abuse and manipulation, to the point where Kailin spends most of her time at a library just to avoid her. Not only does she have to deal with Zhou's abstracted and absurd issues with Kailin herself, but because Zhou has somehow failed to learn even a modicum of English in her years in the States, Kailin has to deal with her complaining about my capital crimes - wearing my shoes in the house, or accidentally leaving a chive fragment on the kitchen floor. The manipulation is reaching hysterical levels - yesterday Zhou complained that "Caleb didn't move the TV to be recycled like he was supposed to." The landlord's TV, not Zhou's. The landlord who didn't indicate to us she wanted the TV moved. The landlord who, by the way, has yet to fix the kitchen light, leaking bathroom and kitchen sink, or mold in the bathroom shower.

This on top of the fact that a family of 3 has moved in and Zhou is bringing in her mother and five year old son to claim asylum for them as well makes me glad I can spend the majority of my time in the city away from that insanity.

Chest-Deep into a Coding Bootcamp

The last 2 months: Scrambling to learn enough Javascript to pass a coding interview so as to get into a coding bootcamp. Scrambling to pack everything we own into my car, then drive it to San Francisco. Scrambling to find a place to live. Scrambling to help Kailin find a job.

Now I'm on week 2, day 10 of my 13 weeks at Makersquare, and my  life has settled into the comfortable, regular, day-in-day-out sort of scramble that these programs require.

Life in San Francisco is good. We found a little pre-fab house in a gated neighborhood in Daly City. It's on top of a hill and next to a state park. Quiet. We fall asleep listening to crickets and frogs. People leave their bikes outside in this neighborhood. I've recently honed my commute down into a less than 40 minute affair, though at the cost of a great deal of planning and fenangling.

Hard to believe how different it is here from Houston. Things as simple as driving are more interesting - in one direction, it's rolling plains for miles. Another - mountains. Hiking locations abound. We can hike up a nearby mountain and see the Pacific Ocean. Sometimes we can hear some sort of tremendous ship's horn blasting, every day around 3pm. People are nice, though they do a lot of yoga.

The bootcamp is intense. I'm  having a hard time tracking the shift in personality and mindset I've undergone through the critical steps in arriving here - deciding to invest 3 months and go into debt for a bootcamp, interviewing for and choosing a bootcamp, taking the plunge in accepting the loans and starting the pre-course material, and then actually starting the program. Each step resulted in a very different me, and I'm curious what sort of Me will come out of this program at the one. Certainly a more employable one.

The day consists of waking up at 630, showering and packing a lunch and dinner, and trying to get out of the door before 7. Bike 10-15 minutes uphill to a Muni bus stop. Ride a bus for 5-10 minutes to another bus stop, then another bus for 3 minutes to a BART station. Ride a BART to downtown, bike to the Makersquare building. Get in around 810-830. Leave at 810-830PM. Work out Tue, Thu, Sat.

It all seems so routine looking at it on my way home, but while there we're kept on our toes. Lectures, practice problems, pair programming, and video content split our day into bite-sized pieces. I never thought I could do what is essentially the same thing (learn to code) for nearly 12 hours straight, but come 8 I always have a sort of "well I could do more of this" feeling, and just go home out of logical necessity.

Makersquare itself has exceeded my expectations for what a coding bootcamp would be. I expected a sort of rote learning experience - tried and tested, every student goes through the same material, and just like in college your huge chunk of change pays for, yes, an education, but mostly a nice fat namebrand sticker. Not the case. They took us in and made us their own, all but telling us "you're our brand, not the other way around." We're only into week 2 and they're implementing a brand new section of the syllabus, dealing with some hot-off-the-press ES6 material. Through the various feedback sessions and check-in tests, I'm seeing them modifying and qualifying their content, making them better and better each cohort that comes through.

The view out of my study area at home

More than just the coding is dealt with. Other than ancillary benefits like free bagels and coffee, the staff act as coaches. "Your job is to code, our job is to worry about you," they've told us. "Hundreds have come before, hundreds have exited this program and gotten employed. You're no different." "We know what we're doing, trust us to make you into engineers." Walking into the building in the morning, it's quite easy to leave my fears outside the door. Will this be worth the massive time and money investment? What if I never get a job? What if I'm just not a good coder? Not smart enough? Not able to handle the bootcamp style of learning? Irrelevant. Makersquare has me convinced - their admissions process has been honed to a razor's edge. A max cohort size is 25, ours is 17, and not for lack of applicants. Those that can't make it through the program and get jobs after aren't let in. Those that can, are. All I have to do after jumping that hurdle is keep on doing exactly what I already have proven I'm capable of doing, and Makersquare will keep on doing what it has proven it's capable of doing.

Creative Writing to this. I never really thought I could do anything like this, and I'm chomping down this material like a champ, holding my own better than I ever thought I could. Partly due to being  motivated by wickedly intelligent classmates, partly due to finally just letting myself believe I can handle this type of left-brain material. Looking forward to seeing what's to come.

Leaving Taiwan T- 2 weeks

Going to be weird to go home, for sure. I've been here more than a year, the longest I've ever been out of the States, and it's been interesting.

I don't really want to go, but I do. It's hard to make a logical argument - my life here is more than perfect. More money and time than I know what to do with. I could have written several books, learned perfect Chinese, and picked up a programming language or two in this time. Yet, I didn't.

I've grown a lot in Taiwan, but it definitely wasn't an end-game. There's still work to do. I've accomplished a lot, but I barely scraped the tip of iceberg of what can be done. Why didn't I acquire fluent Chinese? Why didn't I finish a single story? Why didn't I get out those videos I wanted to get out, or learn that software I had planned on learning since before I even left the States?

The answers to these questions could be simple, like laziness, or a misappropriation for time. Just knowing the answer isn't enough, though. I need to get out of this country to get a perspective on everything that's happened to me. I've just begun to learn how to teach myself how to become a better person, now the ultimate test is a reflection test - what happens when I take myself out of the environment I did so much learning in? Can I retain all my progress? Will I be able to maintain a positive attitude, a fit body, a full weekend? Can I defeat my addiction to time wasters like reddit and video games?  Can I finally get a consistent shower time of under 10 minutes?

Lots of rhetorical questions. As I panic in my final two weeks - have I drunken enough milk tea to satiate my addiction until I return? - these are the things that cross my mind.

Not to mention, all the friends I'll be leaving behind.

Mm dat beiber face

What Does it Cost to Live in Asia? A Monthly Finance Breakdown

A lot of people ask me how I can afford to live in Asia working 14 hours a week. The answer, and the reason I'm still here, is, how can I afford not to? Here's a financial breakdown for the past two months I've lived in Taipei.

I work 14 hours a week at 630TWD/hour (21USD/hour). Most people work closer to 20 or even 30 hours, making far more money than me. I try to be frugal when possible but slip up occasionally, especially regarding food. Furthermore, my high-protein bulking diet is a bit more expensive than the average person's diet, especially since I buy protein powder monthly. I live in a location that allows me to use a Ubike in my daily work commute, which has a startup cost of 0 and a daily usage cost of 0, courtesy of the Taipei City Government. Fun things I've done these last two months are go on a few hikes, go clubbing (~500TWD per), and go on a trip to Kenting (~5000TWD). I'll update this post with May on June 10th.

Kiddoland was my old kindergarten I worked at. The paycheck was so large because they paid me for February and March in March right before letting me go. The pay period is 10th to the 10th, so that is how these are organized.

Average Lunch: 100TWD/3USD
Bus Ride to Kenting: 600TWD/20USD
MRT Ride across Taipei: 25TWD/1USD
Gallon of Milk: 200NTD/6USD
Chicken Breast: 100NTD/3USD
Head of Broccoli: 30TWD/1USD
A Beer from a Bar: 100NT/3USD
A Beer from 7/11: 30NT/1USD

Comment with any questions!

March

	Income	Expense
Witty Bear	28140		$938.00	62140
Kiddoland	34000		$1,133.33
		TWD	USD
Rent		-8000	-$266.67
Utility		-2744	-$91.47
Transportation		-1070	-$35.67
Necessity		-2350	-$78.33
Grocery		-5166	-$172.20
Eating Out		-2423	-$80.77
Fun		-5674	-$189.13
Alcohol		-477	-$15.90
Monthly Total	62140	-27904	Total Remaining:	34236	TWD
	$2,071.33	-$930.13		$1,141.20	USD

April

	Income	Expense
Witty Bear	36800		$1,226.67	36800
		TWD	USD
Rent		-8000	-$266.67
Utility		-1341	-$44.70
Transportation		-889	-$29.63
Necessity		-5140	-$171.33
Grocery		-7546	-$251.53
Eating Out		-1953	-$65.10
Fun		-1010	-$33.67
Alcohol		-80	-$2.67
Monthly Total	36800	-25959	Total Remaining:	45077
	$1,226.67	-$865.30		$1,502.57

Changing How it's Done

For about the past month or two, I've been culminating my little self-improvement experiment I've piddled around with since my freshman year in college.

In the past four years,  I've tried learning languages, teaching myself math, becoming a better student, becoming a better person, and so on. I'd make half-hearted attempts, using websites like codeacademy or khanacademy, observing people I admired and trying to emulate them, or sinking thousands of my hard-earned cash into equally valuable and foolish AIESEC trips (China and Japan? Great investment. Singapore? If I could go back in time....) 

Something about Taiwan has allowed me to really get my shit together. Starting with the challenges of dealing with a culture, particularly an office culture, that reneged against everything I believed to be right, I tried to tackle my inter-personal relationship problems. Negativity and pessimism have been my religion for as long as I can remember, as I flaunted my "obviously-superior intelligence" while doing precisely nothing with my life, mocking those lesser than me daring to do something I viewed as unworthy while I destroyed my posture playing video games and browsing reddit, waiting for my superior future to fall into my lap. I didn't get much done back then, but it paved the path. I read Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends & Influence People" after seeing it recommended upwards of a hundred times on reddit, even though I thought self-help books were for silly losers. 

Sakura of Taiwan, in my opinion.

My first step was learning to swallow my pride. As I job hopped (or got fired) again and again in Taiwan, I wondered: Are these people all idiots, or am I just an asshole? Right now, as I ride this self-improvement wave to see where it'll take me, I'm convinced it's at the very least 50/50, a nice improvement from my previous "10% of me being an asshole, 90% of these people all being idiots." 

Carnegie recommended, among other things, to have the benefit of the doubt. "Do not blame people one iota for who they are. If you were in their shoes, you would feel precisely as they do." That's a hard pill to swallow for someone who has had undeservedly high expectations for everyone but himself most of his life. 

In the end, it was positive thinking that saved my ass. David J. Schwartz's "The Magic of Thinking Big" used a brilliant analogy of foremen. There was a foreman of positive thinking, and a foreman of negative thinking. Feed either one orders, and they will work their hardest to provide all such materials. If I walk around thinking "Taiwan sucks. I'm poor. I'm depressed. These people are idiots," my negative foreman will work his hardest to ensure that that is the case. If I do the opposite, say to myself "Damn, Taiwan's beautiful. These people are unique. This food is amazing. I only work 13 hours a week and live like a king, or at the very least a duke," I find my situation vastly improved. 

Truth be told, at this point sometimes I can't tell whether it's my environment that's improved, or my own personal well being. Yesterday marked the first time in 8 months that I've managed to make it to a paycheck with a non-negative bank balance. I haven't been degraded or yelled at in the office since my most recent firing about 2 months ago. I've got a boatload of fantastic friends. I've even finally gotten my hands on a Costco card. 

I do know, however, that one thing I never want to allow for the rest of my life, is for my environment to dictate what's going on inside me. I can't remember where I read the quote, but it was "Happiness breeds success, success does not breed happiness." You can be anything in the world and be unhappy. I was just lucky enough to be taught how to be happy before I was successful, giving me a much easier path to take. It's probably a helluva lot easier to pull out of depression when you have clear reasons to: shit job, no money, whatever. If I had a good job, decent pay, and was depressed, what on earth would I try as a solution? Buy more things, maybe. Who knows. 

In any case, I've removed my more negative posts from this blog. I'm moving on to more positive things. I've got goals that are as scattered as a blown dandelion, but I've got some goals. I'll start posting about those, and my progress in regards to them, as I continue to try to figure my  life out. 

I've briefly considering taking the Chinese name of, "The Captain." Let's see if I can steer this life in the right direction. 

AIESEC FACI

Had a call today for all ICX AIESEC FACI's. Basically, at the next regional conference, I'll be in charge of training several LCs in sales. It was during the call I realized how solo I'll be taking on this responsibility. Of course I'll have the regular support network, it'll basically be up to me to not only develop the sessions but also to deliver them. It's exciting but seriously daunting. I'm really looking forward to this as a test of my actual ability both to train and also to actually get something constructive done.

There's a Train the Trainer's conference being hosted here in Houston this weekend that I'm attending, which should greatly improve my ability to deliver the sessions at the regional conference later. Everybody that's attended these things has gone on and on about how life changing they are, which seems pretty exciting to me. Just the national conference alone had a great impact on how I think about getting stuff done, so I'm always looking for new ways to radically change myself into what I really want to be, or even figure out what that ideal image is in the first place. There's the problem, that Tyson put pretty succinctly  of getting myself to "drink the koolaid." I can be mistrustful, sometimes for no reason, of groupthink, so it's hard for me to take that step and, you know, drink the koolaid, or fully participate without building a wall between me and the activity/material/presentation. I guess I don't want to be had, or caught up in the emotions/whatever of a group. A seriously arrogant way of thinking.

Gonna suck that I miss mardi gras festivities, would've been badass to head up to New Orleans to chill with some AIESECers and get one last massive party in before whatever it is before I graduate, and holy shit I'm going to graduate.

Speaking of badass parties, my birthday throwdown was amazing. Lining the counter with drinks was a genius, and while normally I'm not a big alcohol person, I've gotta say a perfect balance of inebriation was struck at the party. As far as I could tell, nobody puked (at least inside), all spills were cleaned up instantly, and nothing broke. Great crowd, really pumped to get them together again, thinking maybe valentines day.

Been biking nearly every day and working out far more. Following this workout plan minus the cardio, Daniel and I have been trying to get some bulk. Got on the scale today, I've gained 5 pounds since I started trying to lose weight by going on a 300 calorie or more defecit every day. So, either I've been not keeping good enough track, or I'm broken. Anyway my arms are bigger I guess?

Been studying Python in some attempt to add more useful skills to my repertoire. All that 10,000 hour stuff keeps flitting through my head, and today I watched a speedpaint video, and thought, "Shit that guy is good, man I'll never be that good at something," and then thought about how someone coded photoshop, and how the hell did they do that? Now I'm mega disheartened. Ugh.

Oh I got new clothes, which is super fun

I should be in Japan right now

Why do I always get wing seats?

But I'm not, because Air Canada.

Got to IAH just fine, Colette was being dropped off as well for her flight to Wisconsin. Though, the airport is falling apart it seems:

So now I'm in Canada, waiting for a flight to Vancouver so I can wait in that airport for 5 hours before heading to Tokyo. As opposed to being in Japan ~10 hours ago. I've already sent the email asking for a refund grumble grumble. Basically what happened is my flight to Canada just sat on the runway for 2 hours. We land 30 minutes before my connecting flight. I sprint through the airport, grab my bags (instantly on the little carousel, get your shit together American airports), and sprint to baggage check for Japan. I still had a good 25 minutes to spare, and they won't let me on. They call up a manager, he just says "No." The person said they probably sold my seat to another person. That seat I bought for 1000$? No, someone else owns it now, because we can. So I spent all yesterday pissed off about that. 

Canada's cool, I guess. Nice weather, rolling green hills. According to my uber talkative driver from Africa, there's lots of oil money here. Also he's looking for an American wife so he can move to the USA. Only problem is he's already married. 

I had a giant hotel room to myself. I felt like some lonely weird dude rather than an epic adventurer experiencing a setback from The Man. To make myself feel better, I used a ton of hot water on a 3 hour shower. 

This airport has free internet and Canada's air security didn't grope my balls. Get your shit together, America.  

The Grey, that movie where Neelson punches wolves, was freaking awesome. Watch it. I was on my tiny netbook screen and it was still awesome. I still have a 5 hour layover, so if anybody has any other recommendations, let me know.

Whoops Summer's Gone

I think that picture define's my mood over the past two weeks pretty well. Or maybe one week, really, is more accurate. I went from lazy summer mode, idly studying Japanese and browsing Khan Academy videos, to going on an AIESEC camping trip and then driving to Austin with Steven Jordan (on the left), visiting from AIESEC Indiana. It didn't exactly fly by, every moment was awesome and fun, but it was a lot less slow than derping around my house looking for something to do. It's exactly what I want my life to be like all of the time, actually.

Tyson, on the other hand, can't handle that kind of action. <3

The only problem is finding a way to do that in Houston. Having gone to Austin twice in the last month, I've decided it's a guaranteed way to have fun. There's some pretty good hiking and swimming out there, and if the green belt is any indication, there's good climbing to be had in the area. There's also the bar scene, which AIESEC ate right up.

Carston is my favorite German exchange intern to go to bars with. He started Euro-dancing (clapping and shaking his booty) as soon as we walked into a place. At one point I lost him, walked up to two girls standing alone and asked them if they had seen a tall dancing German guy. This girl got excited and said she was German. So Carston saunters up, I introduce them, they speak in German (only after he pretends to be Dutch for a good 10 minutes), I lose him again. About an hour later I find him in this club (pic is after they turned the lights on at 2am), dancing by himself in that same euro-style while everybody around him rocked to dubstep. I asked him what happened to the German girl. He said she was very young. I asked how young. He said maybe 16. Does that look like a 16 year old to you? She didn't sound like one to me. Germans, man. Germans.

Also, Tyson's bought a house and I'm gonna be renting there for next year. Pretty pumped. It's brand new, just build, huge backyard, and 5 miles off campus. So many adventures will be had. We still have room for a few roomates if anybody wants a part of that. 

Also I just bought my ticket for Japan. It's so shockingly hard to believe that I'm going to Japan that I think my brain has outright refused to believe it at all and so I've just been calmly browsing reddit, waiting for it to hit me.

Anyway, a lot of people have been asking how I nailed a cheap flight at such short notice for Japan. One thing that helped a lot is that the company is paying for the ticket back. Other than that, here are the resources I used:

http://flightfox.com/ : Pretty cool idea. You upload your desired itinerary and what you're offering as a finder's fee (average is like 20$, I offered 50$), and people post flights that they've found using whatever tricks they've learned over the years. You pick one, they walk you through it, you reward the finder's fee.

A bunch of search aggregators:
http://www.wegolo.com/ http://travel.wwte1.com http://farestore.com/home/ http://www.cheapoair.com http://www.statravel.com/ http://www.kayak.com/

And for trying to decide when to book, surprisingly, Bing's travel search has a very powerful flight price predictor. According to reddit, it's because they bought it off some lone programmer and integrated it into their site.

College as an Educational Institution? Madness.

I can be a sensitive guy, dammit!

So Japan fest came and went, and I ended up going both days. The previous weekend I had also helped with cleaning up the Japanese garden in preparation for Japan fest. These events, and the introduction of Umi the Japanese exchange student (seen above left) have made something terrifyingly clear to me:

I am not nearly as good at Japanese as I had thought.


This is a problem, because I am going to Tokyo this summer to work as a kindergarten teacher (幼稚園の先生). So, I have been studying my ass off, and I've noticed something. I'm not sure school is the best place to learn a language. All I do in my Japanese class is have unbelievable amounts of vocabulary and grammar structures jammed down my throat, on which I'm tested on so quickly it's all I can do to barely route memorize it before moving onto the next chapter and immediately forget everything I had already learned. So, how do I rectify this? A few strategies:

1. Printing out Kanji and vocab and taping it up all over my room. 
        This forces me to constantly be thinking about the Kanji, which so far has been the most difficult part of Japanese to learn. Or at least, the most time consuming. While it doesn't help me write the Kanji, it helps me read it much faster. As for the vocab, it constantly refreshes me, allowing me to keep more vocabulary in the readily-accessible part of my memory, and making my spellings/sayings more accurate. The more I know I know, the more I am capable of conveying in a sentence.

2. Downloading Japanese audio files onto my phone
       My Japanese text book comes with a link to a website with a bunch of audio exercises. I downloaded all of them and threw them onto a playlist on my phone. I listen to it between class, while working out, if I'm eating alone, and sometimes even when I go to sleep. I don't know if it's working, but at least I'm becoming better at understanding faster-spoken Japanese.

3. Sharedtalk.com
   This website is pretty awesome, although it is coded in Flash (try it in IE if it's not working for you). Basically, it's a meeting place for people learning languages, set up by Rosetta Stone. So, Japanese people learning English practice their English with me, while I practice my Japanese with them. There's chatrooms and even a voice chat option, which I've been too afraid to try. Props to Cassie for hooking me up with the site, it's been pretty fun.

So those are my little tricks so far, and yet I still struggle. Meh.

The other day I didn't really know what to do and Rachel asked what my goal is. I asked if she meant short-term, and she said she wanted to know what I wanted from life. As in, why do I go to school, get good grades, etc. I had to really think about it, and I realized a source of a lot of my confusion is the fact that I don't really have a long term goal. I have things I want to do (go to Japan, China, drive an expensive car across Europe, give someone a phat scholarship, eat food in an Australian bakery) but no end-game. I don't want to "be a doctor" or "own a house" or anything set. I have this strange fear of commitment in that sense, as if I don't want to limit myself to just one thing. It may not be realistic, but I don't want to be doing one thing for the rest of my life. I guess a dream job for me, in that sense, would be like, I dunno, actor? Secret Agent? Wealthy businessman? So what I realized is that all of my self-motivation, for example, starting to work out every morning, and all my schoolwork (get a 3.5, learn Japanese and Chinese) is just me creating something capable of doing whatever it decides on doing later. Or, capable of doing many things. I'm just acquiring, in the words of Napoleon Dynamite, skillz.

So as to remain feasible, I'm going the way of business, sort of. I'm staying as involved as I can with our AIESEC sales team, calling around local businesses to see if any are interested in hiring international workers through AIESEC. Speaking of, two of our team members each got sales meetings, the first for our LC, so that's exciting. I'll be going with sexy Mr. Alex Bui this Friday. Anyway, the plan is to go to Temple University in Tokyo for a second undergrad degree in Communication, then get my masters in business from University of Nottingham, China. After that, I dunno, isn't that good enough to start doing cool things? Maybe I'll look into the CIA and be a secret agent anyway.

Oh, and if you haven't checked him out, Pogo is a badass remixer. He takes soundclips and mashes them into beautiful songs. He started out with movies, and then started his "Remix the World Project," where he would go to various places in the world, record aspects of their culture, and turn them into incredible mashups. I've made a youtube playlist for the lazy, to be found here.  Because of him, I've started to mess around in FL Studio. If anybody knows of any great tutorials for it, hit me up, because it is... extensive.

Men of the Rodeo

A Toast to Meat

I had gotten home from the AIESEC conference utterly exhausted and with a broken voice. I wanted to do nothing but take a six hour long hot shower and then crawl into bed until class on Monday. 

My Sunday night could not have gone differently.

About thirty minutes after I had gotten home, I was just about to shed my well-worn clothes and burrow into my delightfully never-ending hot shower when a fellow AIESECer called me and said that a member of the National Committee and one of the presenters from the conference needed a place to crash that night. I had been looking to learn more about AIESEC leadership, and have been interested in pursuing a position in an AIESEC national committee after school, so I jumped at the opportunity to have two members well informed in AIESEC international ways hang around all night. 

Exhausted as I was, I cleaned up my room and prepared for two guests. I managed to scrape everything together in what I thought would be enough time to shower, but then I got a call telling me that Alex and Kevin were outside the Quads. So I threw on a shirt, waltzed my barefoot self down there, and welcomed them. As of yet, I didn't quite have a plan for how to entertain them for the night, but that was fine since they were both exhausted as well. So we napped and played with a remote control helicopter. At one point it flew out the window, and when we went out to retrieve it I noticed there were a lot of red ant piles outside. I was struck by the realization that neither Alex nor Kevin had ever encountered our fiery little hell-demons, or knew to avoid their fragile mounds of waiting pain. The ants only live in southern states, and those guys are both from the mid and northern US. It was a strange thing for me to have to warn them about that. I'm used to dealing with people from other countries, where culture differences are glaring and I get to take them to awesome things that one can only find in America, but the fact that other Americans wouldn't know something about this country blew me away. I was assigning unity to a country that is far from it. In other words, I was thinking of Americans as Americans, instead of what we really are, an incredibly diverse group of people living in diverse climates, environments, biomes, and social bubbles. So that was an insight. Also I got bit by a bunch of ants, little frackers.

Anyway, we got a call from Keyon that we were going to entertain our fellow AIESECers, so it was off to the Rodeo. Alex and Kevin were pumped, it was exactly what they were wanting from a stereotypical Texas time. 

Not sure if this counts, but DeLoreans are awesome so whatever.

Anyway, all we really did was eat disgustingly appetizing carnival food, from the somewhat disappointing chocolate covered bacon to fried everything. Of course, after stuffing our faces, we had to get on sickening carnival rides and spin ourselves to the point of projectile vomiting everywhere. I came close to messing on everyone in a football field radius on the "spinning wheel of too much G-force." So close. So, very, close.

Then came a defining moment for me. There was this absolutely blood-curdling ride involving being flung in an enormous circle while being spun and turned and just sort of having stuff done to you with gravity that really shouldn't be. At first, I outright refused to get on. As they waited in line, I decided to just frack it and hop on. I mean, it's just a ride, it lasts one minute, what could happen? And yet, when we finally got up to the thing, I actually jumped the line. I straight up pulled a walk of shame. I'm not sure what made me so terrified, but I just couldn't bring myself to subject my body to that machine. It was pretty humiliating, and I don't understand what I was so afraid of. I'm not a fan of rides, really, I mean they're kind of fun but mostly just make me feel sick and out of control of the situation. But so what? So, mission of now is to defeat fear. I'll figure that out.

Anyway, afterwards we kicked it in my room and played a very revealing game of "Never Have I Ever." I learned that AIESECers are far from innocent. At least they're smart about their debauchery, but I certainly wasn't expecting some of the hardcore things that came up. At conferences, no less. Can't reveal, obviously, but trust me, shit's nuts.

NUTS.

So we go to bed at about 4am and I'm pretty comfortable with the notion that Tommy's going to drive these guys to the airport at some ungodly hour of the morning, allowing me to sleep straight to 11. At 6, Kevin wakes me up and says that Tommy's phone is off and he hasn't heard from him. So, AIESEC is all about that Just Fucking Do It, I throw on a jacket and shoes, roll out to my car, and start to warm it up. It was cold, man, and I was in pajamas. So right when my car's about to get warm and I'm pretty much frozen awake, Tommy finally calls us and says he's on his way. We almost leave anyway, worried that he won't make it in time, but Tommy rescues me and I head straight back into my warm covers. An hour later Kevin wakes me up and I drive him to the airport and spend the rest of my day in a coffee-shocked thousand-yard "just stay awake for thirty more minutes" high. Oh, and I still hadn't showered.

Next time: I try to go to Japan, Japan, China, Japan! SO MUCH ASIA.

ROKS @ Beaumont

First: News. I got a job in Japan for the summer. Starts in June, lasts about 6-7 weeks. I'm pretty excited. I'll be teaching kindergarten, ages 4-7. It's in Tokyo.

AIESEC had a regional conference in Beaumont (Boremont) and I went. It was fantastic.
Basically, a conference is when AIESEC chapters (LCs) of a region's universities (we are MoTexCoKs) all get together to learn stuff (party). It's sold as an event at which one will meet awesome people, learn a lot about AIESEC and whatever one's role at AIESEC is, become a lot more enthused about AIESEC stuff, and have a great time. Usually I'm not convinced by those sorts of things but AIESEC has been a sort of trend setter in terms of destruction of my cynicism. In fact, I've been surprised time and time again by it's dedication to maintaining a positive image and atmosphere. For example, when we first arrived at the hotel in the middle of Egypt - sorry, Beaumont - one of the steps in the sign-in process was an ID check. They gave us little zip ties (orange thing on my wrist in the pic above) that determined one's age. If you didn't have the right one, you weren't to drink, end of story. Of course, the thing about zip ties is they can only tighten, so if you had an itch and scratched the wrong way, there goes hand circulation. Anyway, still impressive self-control.

We started the first night with an sort of explanation of what would be happening at the conference. They dropped some pretty depressing statistics about how poorly our region was doing compared to others. By the end of that presentation, I was feeling pretty pumped about getting our LC on track. That was a sort of theme of the conference: getting shit done. Actually, I think the theme was literally: JFDI, or, Just Fucking Do It.

First party of the conference: South of the Border

Great time. The hotel gave let us party in the conference room all night, with basically no noise restrictions. For some reason, not as many people turned up as I had thought would, but it was still fun. Quick aside: All of AIESEC Dallas is Asian, and one Russian. When I asked them why, they said "Well, Americans applied..." Anyway, I got called out hardcore on my yellow fever. Great times. I forgot to bring Twister, but I did do that thing I'm starting to do at parties, where I take something and put it on a bunch of different people and take pictures of them, as candidly as I can. In this case,  it was that giant sombrero pictured above. Here's a link to the set of people I captured. Like I said, candid. I think Danny wins the "quick you're having a photo taken of you wearing this giant sombrero do something cool" contest:

My team leader parties hardy

The next day it was wake up early and get to your respective team's meeting. I somehow managed to wake up, shower, and make it downstairs in time to chow on something like 5 hardboiled eggs in an attempt to make it to lunch without feeling the rumblies. Protein, right? Anyway, we were in that room for about 8 hours straight, with maybe 2 coffee and one lunch break. Still,  it played perfectly off the inspiration our team had been feeling from the previous day's meeting. Our numbers are bad, so how do we fix it? 8 hours of intensive AIESEC selling tips and we knew exactly how. It was exactly what I needed to finally be able to get down and dirty in AIESEC Business Development (my job is to find companies that want to partner with AIESEC, that is, bring in foreign interns). We also got to do a mock cold call and sales meeting, something I've been wanting to do since joining AIESEC last year. Our team was pumped afterwards. Danny, Alex and I couldn't stop gushing about how we "got this shit. We're gonna Just Fucking Do It." Then it was time to party.

We take these sorts of things seriously.

The theme was come as you aren't. Alex and I came as women. Great night. Lots of dancing and stuff. Yep.

Final day came and it was actually pretty sad. I had made a lot of friends, and the environment of living in a hotel all together had created a sort of fun little AIESEC community that I would miss. We had little optional "AIESEC University" classes, and I attended one about leadership within AIESEC. Something that's been bugging me is that my ability to take a leadership position in AIESEC is somewhat impossible at this point because of the way leadership terms work. For example, if I wanted to be VP of my current team, I would be elected next January, with my term lasting until January 2014. I graduate in May of 2013. So, I'm sort of in limbo. It's very sad, and makes me wish I had gotten my shit together well before halfway through my sophomore year. However, I do draw hope from the fact that it is possible to actually work for AIESEC for a year as a member of a National Committee. One such member told me that he his work for his local team had been so successful that he was invited to become a member of a National Committee of several countries. 

But since I'm graduating next May, there's not much time left to make a name for myself in AIESEC.... the thought depressed me, along with the also recent train of thought I've been having about my major. I'll delve into this more in the next post. This one has gotten long enough. Next post will be in sooner than a month, since lots of fun stuff has been happening. 

Twister Happens Too Much

Updates:

Ivy Zhang came and went out of our lives way too quickly. She visited our AIESEC chapter from China to come teach us how things are done over in the Glorious Nation, and to recruit some people to intern over there this summer. We took her to a Houston Rocket's game, which was fun to organize. Still gotta collect money off of people for that... my wallet will be so fat.

Speaking of fat, my 21st birthday came and went. I am a decrepit old man now. The party was pretty fun though. It wasn't hard to convince all the guys to take their shirts off as soon as the Twister mat came out. I'm starting to notice a trend here with this whole Twister and shirts coming off thing.

Mindy does not look amused.

Lately Taub has been making me proud. Rice's trampoline was stolen and brought to Taub, resulting in much fun. RA's came to take it, though, so we had to perform the quickest noontime trampoline take-down disappearing act ever. Ended up spreading the thing throughout random people's rooms and taking it out in the middle of the night for an epic nighttime trampoline party. 

RAs came to break up our party within about 2 hours. That time, they were pretty resistant to us just breaking the thing down and making it disappear. I don't get why they'd want to bother going through all the work when their state of being remains neutral regardless of the result. When I asked them if they really wanted to take the whole thing apart on their own, they said we could help them. That's a joke. I ended up dragging it out of Quads territory with the few remaining brave souls that were audacious enough to stand against the might of the omnipotent RAs. Another quick tear down and smuggling into the backdoor of Taub was a success. We were supposed to get rid of the thing the next night but cold rain thwarted us. I ended up relinquishing responsibility of the damn thing, and some other conspirator somehow negotiated a return to Rice PD. Not sure how that works, but whatever, my hands are clean. Until I take it again.

There was a pretty sick Valentine's party at Calhoun. We got a Taub crowd together and classed up because, you know, we got dat reputation and all.

Swag.

Code for the party was white:single, red:taken, pink:transition, black:fuckoff. Aww yea, Kim and I are too good for party hoes. Alex and David, on the other hand, came as twin ladykillers.  Pretty sweet party, got our dance on, some people got their game on (protip: she's Chinese, sorry guy, it's not happening). Although Santa Claus crashed it at one point. Didn't get a pic, so I'll just old fashioned it: He looked like Santa Claus, and he was in his underwear. Came in, told us to keep it down, I said "ok," then he came back and started taking pics. So we moved the party, partied more, and then for some reason I still don't understand, moved the party back to where we had gotten kicked out of not an hour earlier. Of course the party is shut down so we move to the far superior Taub basement. Where, of course...

It really can't be helped.

At one point I took off Xiaohan's glasses, effectively blinding her and leaving her helpless, and put them on everyone, and then candid camera'd them. I'll just do my best to name them... Simon, Lien, Asian Arm, David Stonenburger , Possibly Soulless, Not drunk, Not Drunk #2.  You could say it... was a spectacle

AWWWWW YEEEEAAAAAH

I slept hard. And alone. All black mission: Accomplished!

In other news, I got an invitation for an internship in Japan this summer. Sounds pretty sick, I'd be consulting a company about working with foreigners. It'd take some serious Japanese skills. I had to send off a letter of motivation entirely in Japanese and if I'm translating this email correctly, apparently there'll be a phone interview. So, it's study-the-ass-off time. The hardest thing is staying focused and staying positive. It's hard to believe it could actually happen.

Also I'm directing a play about robots. NEAT.

Between a Break and a Break

The plays went awesomely. There should be a video of mine going up pretty soon, I'll stick a link to it here. I slipped up on a line in the second performance, but Chris managed to smooth it over fine, and by the end of the play we had it back together. Saturday's performance was out of the world, though I almost lost it when Olivia's fake pee-bag wouldn't stop dripping everywhere onstage.

The club theater crew is an amazing group of people, and the whole experience is always great stress relief. They also throw the best parties, and, being a collection of theater and engineering nerds, make the best costumes. We had a lot of fun messing around backstage while waiting to go on. I can only hope the people using that classroom we occupied enjoyed our additions:

On the Saturday of the last performance, Josh and I got up early to head out to Warrior Dash, a 5k through muddy obstacles. I was getting pretty pumped when I arrived and saw the people coming out.

Apparently the event was some kind of fundraiser for veterans. They also had this huge pile of muddy shoes, which would be sent to poor kids, hopefully cleaned beforehand. The stack had doubled in size by the time I left, which makes me really wonder about the logistics of the cleaning operation. A lot of people were in costumes, which unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of due to my desire to avoid destroying a camera on the track itself. Spotted were a pair of gay cops, three bananas, and a couple in business professional. I just sported my (now destroyed) "do me" shirt from Halloween and winged it. No offers, but that's probably because the text was covered in mud and manliness by the end of the race. Anyway, Josh totally pussed out within 5 minutes of the run, leaving me running circles around him and shouting myself hoarse ALL ALONE. I was shocked at the lack of shouting from other runners, actually. Next year, I will be sure to take things much farther, perhaps too far. There was a sports photography company there, but their photographs are copyrighted beyond use, so the only post-picture I have is of my shoes, which were utterly raped by the mud:

I never knew there was room for anything in my Vibrams but my feet, but mud proved an able opponent.

ESPN came to our campus, or something. I don't know, but they set up what appeared to be a spaceport in front of the UC.

Not shown: Cosmonauts in Jerseys

UH is undefeated and I am told this is a good thing. I am proud that the athletes attending my school are beating up the athletes attending other schools.

The first floor prank war has found it's way to the second floor. Just spotted wild driftweave tied to someone's door today. Have fun pulling that off. 

For me, the biggest question is: Who weave dat is?

I realized when I went home for Thanksgiving dinner how trapped I've been on this campus. Compared to last semester, I've been ridiculously closed-minded. I updated my resume and had to change " to Present" to "to May 2011" for too many things. I'm not sure what happened to my motivation or social skills, but I crashed and burned into a hermit. Hopefully escaping the state for a bit this winter break will help clear my head. Oh, and I brought three Chinese guys over for dinner. They seemed to enjoy it. Bravo kept eating everything my mom threw at him, only stopping to ask if she was breaking some weird Chinese culture rule and Bravo would just eat until he popped to be polite. No culture thing there, mom, Bravo's just a black hole. 

Ten page paper due on Tuesday. I've completed the research, now I just have to write the damn thing. For some reason it's not quite as easy as throwing together a blog post. Amazing the things I can get done when I have certain doom looming over my head from my own procrastination. I'll have to get it together, with only, what, three weeks before finals? I'll probably sleep for a month when this is all over.

That picture at the top is of a mysterious door in the English building. Lockpicking is not good enough for it, clearly I will have to learn advanced codebreaking.