100 Days of a Yalie's Summer

While this trip has been an incredible experience “getting away from real life” so to speak, today marks my last week away! With the imminent passage of time counting away my days left in Japan, here’s a brief look at the (smaller) things I still need to accomplish this summer:

Redo all the music on my iPod. After everything got corrupted during spring break, it’s time to refresh it all!

Upload like 3 years worth of photos from my phone onto Facebook. It WILL happen! I just need to go through my photos and delete stuff first, then I can figure out what I want to keep and then upload them all. Ahh, what a daunting task! Especially if I want to tag/caption…

Actually read up on how to bulk up. Is this happening?? It should!

Figure out what restaurants need to go on my restaurant list for senior year! I should get Yelping soon…

FIGURE OUT MY BUDGET. Oh my god, stressing out about money is so painful. I need to finish budgeting for like, November through May (so like, seven months?? Jesus that’s a lot…)

Read the papers that got sent my way. Like. Yes. I need to do that, preferably sooner rather than later.

Officially past the 20% mark in these entries!

Friendships are a bit odd—I wrote on this a couple days ago, I know, but to reflect on this topic again: friendships are odd.

Can you outgrow a friendship?

It just feels like—wires reconnected just slightly differently? Puzzle pieces that nearly—awkwardly, jaggedly—fit together?

Is it because I went away to Yale? Is it because I spent three years incubating in a northeast, liberal arts environment? Is it because I spent years apart?

Or would this have happened regardless of where I went to school?

It’s not bad, per se. It’s just not like high school anymore, and I’m not entirely sure why. The pieces just don’t seem to piece together the same way.

Maybe it’s still too early to tell.

But maybe not.

Have I outgrown Dallas? Texas? My former network?

My thoughts on my future budget:

10% saving for retirement

10% saving for a vacation fund

10% saving for a baby fund

10% saving for a house fund

10% rainy day fund??

50% living expenses

Now, assuming I’m living on an annual post-tax $60,000 salary, that’s:

$6000/year for retirement à I need to calculate what the net present value of that amount would be, assuming 40 years of working…

$6000/year for vacations à a little on the high side? After all, if each major vacation is like $2000, which is a LOT, that’s 3 major vacations a year…

$6000/year for a baby à ok, that’s definitely not enough, especially if a baby costs $150,000, it’d take me 25 years to save enough to have a baby…I need to save, like, $30,000 a year in order to have a baby within 5 years. Or I need to marry rich. FUCK.

$6000/year for a house down payment à that’s…reasonable? If I’m going for a $300,000 house in Texas, and the down payment is 10%, or $30,000, I’d move into a real house in 5 years. Ok, that’s actually a really low down payment and kind of a long time…so I think, again, I need to marry (actually, for a single person, do I need a $300,000 house??) or I need to put in slightly more, like $10,000 a year?

$6000/year for a rainy day fund à maybe on the high side? After 4 years, my rainy day fund would be ~$25,000, which would only be necessary for like, ginormous catastrophe.

$30,000/year for living expenses à $2500/month, which I think is rather reasonable. If I pay $1000/month for rent, and like $100/week for food or like $500 a month, then I still have another $1000 per month left over…hmm, will need to figure this out a bit more.

Obviously, a lot of this needs to be fleshed out a bit more, but it makes sense so far. Let’s say I zoom this into what I’m planning on doing this summer, on a $10,000 post-tax summer earnings:

$1,000 for retirement à low, especially if I’m going to end up putting $5000 in anyway

$1,000 for vacations à low if I’m going to be planning a post-graduation bonanza…must re-evaluate lol

$1,000 for a baby à omg do I need to start this summer

$1,000 for a house down payment à again, do I need to start? It’d be a good habit I suppose…

$1,000 for a rainy day fund à makes sense…should I open a separate bank account for the rainy day?

$5,000 for living expenses à I might spend like $1,000 during the summer, but I should finish my budget spreadsheets to figure out what my living expenses during the school year look like.

Downsides of traveling with people: not being able to control your schedule, your pace, your prices.

Tradeoffs to traveling, I suppose.

I’ve spent quite a bit of money already…

Relationship with money is weird.

Always want more of it.

Willing to work for it—need to earn more, need to earn more…

Money is hard to earn.

Nothing is ever easy.

I want money to be easy. Sex is easy, being a sugar baby should be easy—but getting more money is not easy, or as easy as I’d like it to be.

Money is a worry, a ticker in the back of my mind, counting down to something bad.

Fun day running around Tokyo again with friends—butler café, catching up, etc.

Friendships are interesting like that—people who I haven’t seen in over a year, and we slide back into familiar joking.

It’s weird to think about friendships ending, friendships drifting apart, friendships drifting in and out with each other. Who knows when the next time we see each other will be?

I guess any future is hard to predict that way.

Who knows who my best friend will be in 5 years? 10 years? The people who I meet that will touch my life—and leave. The people I meet who will touch my life, and stay. The people I meet who I expect to touch my life but won’t.

Tired after a long day at Mt. Fuji.

Pissed at myself after losing yet another item on my trip—this time, The Sound and the Fury, on the back seat of a bus.

Glad to have met and made a new friend while traveling—looks like I have an excuse to go back to Montreal!

Excited to meet up with high school friends again tomorrow~

A little sad about leaving 姑妈 and姑父’s house early tomorrow morning.

Nostalgic after listening to Sam Tsui’s “Don’t Want an Ending” and thinking about all the people who I might not see again (or at least, for a long long while) since they graduated.

Thor’s muscled arms and chests flexed and bulged, but he couldn’t feel anything give. Through gritted teeth, he said, “Untie me. Now.”

“Hmmm.” Loki’s fingers traced over Thor’s heaving pecs, pausing on a pert nipple before—

Thor yelped at the pinch, jerking again in his bonds. The sensation went straight to his cock. His dick, already half-hard, lurched against the smooth silk of his sleep pants. “A bit sensitive there, hmm, Sire?” Loki asked, massaging Thor’s nipples before pinching them again, this time adding a bit of a twist to the motion.

Thor let out an involuntary moan. His dick leapt to full attention. “Loki,” Thor choked out. “Stop this and untie me! What do you think you’re doing, touching your king like—“

Thor awoke slowly, blinking into consciousness and rubbing at his eyes to clear away the sleep-grit.

Or attempted to, at least, but when he tried moving his arm, nothing moved. He tugged again before realizing that his wrists appeared to be bound—above his head?

His thoughts seemed to crawl, as if wading through molasses; the world felt so damn heavy.

“Awake, sire?” a voice called from a corner of the room, too dark for Thor to make out a face. Still, the voice was a familiar one.

“Councilman Loki?” he croaked. That couldn’t be right. Why would Loki be here right now? Thor shook his head in an attempt to clear away the wool stuffed in his skull, but the cottony feeling only gave way slightly. Still, he came to realize that he was standing upright in nothing but the thin pants he wore to sleep. His wrists seemed to be tied with a hemp rope and looped through a bar on the ceiling; passed out as he was, his arms had been bearing most of his weight and were beginning to ache with soreness. He shifted his weight back to his feet and looked around the dark room, lit only by a single dim candle on the night stand by his bed. He was still in his chambers, then.

“Oh, sire,” the voice breathed in his ear. Thor startled and his wrists jerked in their bondage; he hadn’t heard Loki’s approach at all.

“What—what is the meaning of this,” Thor growled. He began tugging at his wrists, but his skin only chafed under the rough rope. Loki had tied his knots too tightly, too well for any hope of an easy escape. “Untie me now.”

Lives diverge so easily.

Meeting with Kevin today, if I had—

--gone to Jasper, with all the other Asians I knew—

--gone to TAMS, like so many of my friends (Jonathan, Kevin, Katarina, did)—

--gone to UT (with my Plano crew), gone to UTD (as a McDermott Scholarship), gone to USC (out in SoCal)—

--gone on to finish my pre-med track (would I have found consulting?)—

different destinies that could’ve awaited me.

One of my core tenets has always been to live life with no regrets, and I don’t regret any of the choices I made, per se. I understood why I chose what I did, and I firmly believe that given the same information and the same circumstances, I would make each choice the same way over and over again.

While wandering the Tokyo National Museum today, I was a little surprised to see the Chinese artifacts on display in the gallery. Particularly, it was a bit jarring to see the same Chinese/Kanji characters, perfectly preserved, impressed on scrolls that were thousands of years old. Indeed, I could read some of the characters—characters that apparently weren’t changed by the intervening centuries—and wasn’t that a surprise?

The steady transmission of knowledge is a mind-boggling concept. The written word, intricate farming techniques, delicate art forms, the whole body of human knowledge and discovery has been transmitted, generation after generation, until it reached us today.

Wow. Just wow.

It’s interesting traveling Japan.

It’s the first time I’m in a country where I look like a local—but I’m not. So people assume to speak to me in Japanese, and all I can do is stumble along in broken English.

On one hand, it’s nice not being overtly conscious of my Asian-ness, the way I was in Budapest (Frankfurt has a decent Chinese population! Who knew?) and in so many other European cities. People aren’t waiting for me to break out into Asian tourist mode because, well, everyone is Asian.

It’s a little jarring, because for once I can actually pass for a not-tourist, but it’s a squandered opportunity the moment I open my mouth.

A have a couple story ideas floating around in my head.

The first, since I just finished reading The Iliad, and a Ulysses-style interpretation of Homer’s first epic. Thus, a modern-day Achilles, who—instead of being defined by his rage/sorrow/passion—is defined by his weakness and perhaps paucity of emotion. Patroclus’s counterpart will be more well-known; Hector will be braver; the gods will be reduced to figureheads. The thing will be written stream-of-consciousness style.

Do I have the skill to pull off a Joyce? Probably not, but it might be fun to try, no?

Pretty fucking drunk, but like, damn. Loved the hostel crowd I hung out with. Some pretty sick dudes from the GTA, and the UMich kid. How awesome it is to meet people and click, y’know? And like, that’s the awesome thing about life, all the different people you meet, the way different paths intersect. Like, dude, Leon wants to work at Bain! How sick is that? What a coincidence.

Is it fate? Is it coincidence? Who knows. The point is, hostels and metting people from all sorts of background, all around the world—pretty fucking sick. Hope I’ll be able to pick up some New Zealand travel tips from the UMich guy, because what a life, what a way of living, dude.

Looks like I’m good at missing Saturdays…in my defense this time, I was on a train, so I forgot? Not much of a defense, but meh.

Today I’m going to talk about my interest in Impressionism and abstract art, because, wow, that Monet exhibit at the Stadel museum. I’m a huge fan of Monet, and of Impressionism in general, because I love the way he perceives the world. Everything is slightly blurred—whether by London fog, light rain, or simply the artist’s perception—and the easy blend of soft hues casts a delicate view of the world. It’s this beautiful vision of his: dappled softness and tender pastels that so draws me into his work.

My interest in abstract art is a step in this direction, but perhaps further. Mondrian, Jackson, Rothko, among others—I’m entranced by their vision of the world, be it the rigid geometrically ordered lines or the chaotic explosion of biting color.

How does the artist see the world? How do I see the world reflected in this work of abstract art? What does the art make me feel?

I visited the “House of Terrors” today, a museum that chronicled the atrocities that occurred during the Nazi and Soviet occupations of Hungary.

I hate how the museum packages it into this aesthetically artful—horrific, yet still artful—display, complete with slick printed guides and eerie piped music. It presents this history as neatly packaged away, a relic of the past, instead of as a reminder of the horrors of the present.

They could include a couple Guantanamo Bay references, for example.

In the fifty years after Guantanamo Bay closes, the place will be memorialized much the same way this house of horrors is. Guantanamo Bay will contain delicate displays and hordes of tourists ogle at how state prisoners could have ever endured the inhumane conditions of the place. The tourists will shudder, and then walk away thankful that, hey, at least this is the past, right?

But it’s not the past. The horrors of the museum aren’t in the fucking past, because the past is repeating itself right before our eyes, and everyone who has ever vowed “never again—never again—“—how can you stand the hypocrisy, the nation was built on the labor of slaves, this nation continues to deny civil rights and due process to its underclass, this nation is a fucking reincarnation of everything we once hoped to avoid—members of Congress are lining up to reinstate the Patriot Act for another 5 years—do people not care? Do people not care?

Interesting day! A couple of thoughts about traveling alone:

1. I love having the freedom to choose what I want to do, when I want to do it. Especially after having spent the weekend traveling with a couple of people, the contrast was pretty stark. I got to choose to walk everywhere, I got to choose not to go into the museums, I got to choose to eat at the cheap Greek place.

2. It can get lonely though…especially seeing all the couples wandering about, seeing couples take pictures of/with each other, seeing couples strolling hand-in-hand by the gorgeous river…maybe a little bit of couple jealousy.

Long, interesting day. Not too much to describe, so maybe I’ll just continue with what I was working on before.

I think what really bothers me about The Iliad is its absence of a moral center. I mean, look at the Greeks: Achilles is clearly the hero, so he’d be the first candidate for the moral center. But the first thing we see of him is his argument with Agamemnon, which he loses, and then he disappears for at least like 7 books, so clearly he can’t be the moral center for the first third of the book at least. Of the other Greeks: Agamemnon is sometimes upheld and sometimes punished (see: argument with Achilles); Odysseus hasn’t done enough in the book yet to be considered a moral compass; Diomedes is basically a slaughter machine (is that the moral????); Ajax, see Diomedes’s entry. Next, let’s turn to the gods. The problem is that the gods fight each other so “divinity” can’t be a moral center; are Hera and Athena morally righteous in punishing the Trojans, or are Aphrodite/Apollo/Ares right in protecting Trojans? Finally, Zeus…capricious, whimsical Zeus who doesn’t seem to really support either side. How can “justice” or “morality” be so arbitrary?