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Senior @ Deis. ep11. I Literally Cannot
Main Plot Starts Here
Professor Peter Kalb looked at me and said, Nancy, right?
He is an art professor, likely managing numerous research projects, classes, and students. His office looks like a shrine to years of intellectual property. Sitting inside makes me feel sacred and even low of myself. When he looked at me, I felt helpless. What is going on with all those professors with blue eyes? It is like they know they have powerful gazes, and they stare at you with peace.
So I started exposing my made-up excuses that are honestly not excuses.
Purity
I talked with Cheng Xu, who is an Apple engineer who is so passionate about tennis. He puts in more effort than I do, and I’m the varsity athlete who is struggling to keep up with the lousy team schedule.
Their passion is so pure, and they always remind me of what I was losing over the years. At some point, the romance of academia is gone, and the stress of packaging myself as an industrial product becomes real, and I blame myself whenever I think of an idealistic, sacred pursuit of knowledge.
I think of Michael Heller, who always gets dressed up in his grey cotton suit in lectures. He plays cello like it’s his lover. I think of Dan Roberts, whose insecurity blasts through as he never looks at people directly in conversations, not out of impoliteness. I am so sure of that. He was a high school teacher in his 20s, or possibly early 30s. What was his thinking when facing a room of fresh high school kids learning about nuance through Shakespeare and In Cold Blood?
MUS
My friends and I used to make fun of this music lab instructor, who made us clap and step on beats for music tracks. Asyncopation and whatever. We often said - it’s not that deep and chuckle at the way he leans against the piano. For a half-credit music lab, we would receive relatively comprehensive homework sheets that he probably did not even grade.
There were nights when my two other close friends and I were sitting in the student lounge in Usen Hall. Table full of snacks and worksheets. We played Charades. We laughed so much we started leaning onto one another. We were in Usdan also. Working on our own silly assignments.
I can barely remember the times when I was passionate about culture and psychology. Now I would want to dream about when I was in the lecture hall, listening out of interest rather than attendance. People treat everything with so much purpose now. It is so ironic that we spend this much time dreaming, reading, discussing, writing numerous essays and poems about where we live, yet when we really start living, everything we do immediately becomes evaluated by metrics and reports. Not so cute huh.
At the end of Mary and Max, Max narrated slowly that we spent our whole lives finding who we are. We spend, on average, 16 years living in a tower of ivory. I honestly don’t know the real growth effect of being trained to listen to rules and bending over to institutions. I spent a whole 2 years practicing writing argumentative essays, yet it was not until my senior year of college that I started to get a preliminary sense of the sincere, heartfelt, bloody, screaming thoughts of our forefathers. The first version of The World as Will and Representation by Schopenhauer did not even stir a single ripple. I barely scratched the surface of his story, but I want to cry for him. How stubborn he was. How lonely he was. I know I have said this multiple times across my entire blog, but knowledge can indeed travel through time, and I was consoled by this weird German across over 200 years.
It was the end of 2025, when I was counting down days toward daylight saving, and the night fell way too early, I listened to Schopenhauer’s story, and my heart shook for him. In blurry versions before I fall asleep, I remember first hearing the name when I was maybe under 12 years old in this writing institution called Elite. I have thick printed books - collections of philosophy articles. I treated the vocabulary “philosophy” as a fancy word, and I thought the name “Schopenhauer” sounds like “tie my shoe.” My teacher is named Edward. He is some Korean dude who - at the time I thought - loved picking up on me. I wonder what he is doing now.
Back in the first two years at Brandeis. We treated everything so seriously. A girl cried because of a music quiz, and now she has transferred already, and I haven’t seen her in a long time. I haven’t talked to the other friend in forever due to a bad argument over differences. But that friend was legitimately the person that I feel the most similar to in my entire college life. We would complain about the same teachers, gossip over other Chinese kids, play Honor of Kings as if there is no tomorrow, and play crappy piano pieces - I bet professor Berger was really holding himself back from telling us, what the fuck are you guys playing.
Back then, I had such pure academic pursuits, and 3.8 feels too low for me. 4.2 feels too low for me. I would finish reading all the international politics papers without ChatGPT since it just didn’t exist at the time. I read through the whole AP economics textbook. I love thinking about using theories to explain worldly phenomena. I was the teacher’s pet. I put such effort in all my classes, and that academic pressure alone made me cry at times.
We were all so close. We would hit Boston on a normal Tuesday night and watch horror movies. We would do such silly things. Back then, nothing was much purposeful, and I was very much such a kid (still a kid).
I was writing the programming assignment racecar in Goldfarb library, and my friend went, hmm, I don’t even understand what you’re doing anymore. I said, yeah… so do I.
Eventually, I passed that class with an A-, and I was just SO proud of myself.
The same semester, my friends would take shuttles on Friday to places like children’s hospitals for charity concerts for a music class.
I have not set foot inside Slosberg for a long time.
Next up:
Senior @ Deis. ep13. Did I Win?
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