I'm back in my on-campus apartment, back in Boston, and back to start another semester.
Break was nice. I did a lot of sleeping. I caught up with some of my high school friends. I've also applied to a couple of internships. And I even worked on a personal project: a light show. The light show is almost done: I've diligently built the display, wired the circuit, albeit sort of messy, and wrote a program to write code for me. So all that's left is to have the program I wrote write some nice sequences to display. It's been tedious work, especially the building of the display part, but I am happy with the results, however crude it is.
This semester will be a good one, I feel and think. So, I look forward to this semester. Well, I'm going to go relax some more: make sure I'm well rested -- I don't want to start this semester tired. =]
I'll leave you with a picture I took today of my prism doing it's job, that is separating white light into red light, orange light, yellow light, green light, blue light, indigo light, and a little bit of violet light.
I think my lack of posting has to do with several things:
1: I don't find the need to post a lot about my daily activities. I will occasionally, but it's not gonna be several posts straight. 2: Posting about weather is mundane to read. 3: I've realize that I understand and know very little about the world, or anything. And when you understand so little and wonder so much, there's not much to write about except questions. I don't think a blog post full of questions and few answers is sufficient post. But I may have to start doing that or else my monthly post count will continue to dwindle. 4: I don't run into interesting things worthy of sharing. Like songs and phrases and stuff. Everything I've been encountering lately hasn't really stroke a chord with me. And 5: It's difficult to articulate my inner thoughts. So unless I have lots of time, I just don't write about them.
Title of the post says it all. But worst of all, I haven't made my usual post updating about my classes. Yikes. I usually make a good attempt to do so. But . . . *shrugs* It has escaped me this semester. And even now, I really don't feel like elaborating on them. I'll just quickly post what I'm taking this semester: Electronics, Logic Design, Electromagnetics, and Signals & Systems. And yes, they are in order from favorite to least favorite. Although, Logic Design and Electronics are pretty tied -- sometimes, I will like Electronics more and other times I will like Logic Design more. I do feel smarter than last semester, so this semester has not been a waste, but I am not doing as well as I hoped. But of course, I haven't taken finals yet so my grades are still to be determined. SIGH. It has been one of those types of semester.
I will leave you with my final project for my Logic Design class: a Pokémon game created using Verilog and a Spartan 6 FPGA board. My group and I spent many hours working very hard on this. Enjoy. =]
I don't really know how this happened, but I deeply, truly believe that in order to live life and be happy and successful and content, one must experience as much as the world has to offer as possible. I do have morals though, you know, treat others the way you'd like to be treated and the freedom to live life as you please as long as you are not causing harm to yourself or others. That means I won't ever try things that will compromise my morals. But I will try everything else so that I can experience joy, accomplishment, hope, excitement, luck, love, friendship, success, pleasure, change, discomfort, boredom, passion, confidence, etc. But that also includes negative experiences that elicit fear, sadness, anger, frustration, failure, worry, loneliness, misfortune, etc. Sometimes, I get frustrated that I'm not living enough, that I won't succeed in life, because I've yet to fail, yet to fall into a ditch, or deep dark tunnel, yet to do anything really difficult. I know I should never wish misfortune on myself. And I don't. I just would happily embrace it if it came my way. Sometimes, you have to look for it, to step out of you comfort zone. Sometimes you have to suffer, and it will be by choice.
And when I do experience something unfortunate, I feel happy. You can see easily how with that mindset, that all experiences are valuable, it's kind of difficult to truly feel upset for long. You kind of always smile. And when you don't smile, you just have to remember that it's part of life and once you realize that, you smile knowing you are living. It's similar to how Giselle from Disney's Enchanted reacts when she gets angry. She's genuinely angry, frustrated. But the fact that she's just experienced anger makes her happy. That's kind of how I feel. I can have an awful day, but I feel good knowing that I had an awful day. That it's part of life. That I lived.
Here's the Giselle angry/happy scene, if you are unfaimilar with it:
I think in that way, feeling happy about misfortune, I can somewhat relate, but not really, to people who inflict pain on themselves. It feels good to know that you are living and experiencing emotions. But hurting yourself is never something you should do. Although, I do admit that in high school, I once scratched "EMO" onto my wrist purely out of curiosity, I was not depressed or sad or angry or self-destructive. I was just odd. For me, it was an experience, it was fun. Of course, I didn't understand why I wanted to do that at that time. But I do now, it's just me wanting to experience things. I understand that hurting oneself is a serious matter and I don't take that lightly at all.
It's very carefree to live like this. You don't truly get angry or stressed or hung over things, which can do great things for your mind. But at the same time, you can also see how this can backfire, how you can start feeling indifferent to things you shouldn't. That you really should be affected by the pressure and fear of failure. What saves me from never-ending indifference toward life when I do start to feel rather indifferent is my ambition be great. Great people do not fail often and are not indifferent. So I won't fail at something I can succeed at. I will not welcome failure.
This post is kind of offbeat and unusual and I didn't do a great job articulating my thoughts, but its the best I can tonight. I will end this post with one of my most favorite compliments I ever received. A most amazing and caring woman once said to me that "Scientists should work on finding a way to bottle [my] enthusiasm and zest for life!" And I like to think it's true that I have a zest for life. I want it to be true. =]
