Nest

“There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want.” — Bill Waterson, 1988

Reading

Finished the Odyssey, it doesn’t have as beautiful language as the Iliad, but it’s still quite a good story. Even though it covers many locations, the story somehow feels more straightforward, probably because it follows the typical Hero’s Journey in the adventure aspect.

Art

I’ve been getting better at hands and drawing in perspective. Something I realized is that when I try to draw, I’ve been focusing too much on just the 2D shapes that it looks flat even though the anatomy is improving. The best things that I draw are usually things that evoke a sense of depth using foreshortening and crazy angles.

When I began to draw two years ago, my fear was that I would accidentally draw something so good that I could never draw something better than that. When I heard about the story of Porter Robinson’s depression after he completed Worlds, I realized that this is something that all artists go through.

In the end, the answer was to just do art for the sake of it, to do it not because it is needed, but because it is the definition of doing what you want.

Polygon Dust

“Taking back wasted time that we have spent” is something that I wouldn’t do even if I could. Wasting time might be one of the most important things in life.

A few weeks ago, J came to my alley and sat on the bench in front of my pastel drawings and smudged one of them. He was like “Oh, **** I just **** this guy.”

I was angry for maybe like a few ms, but then the feeling faded away since the drawings are just dust on tree bark.

Unfortunately though, J just did laundry before this happened, and the oil pastel doesn’t come out so easily. But at least clothes are merely layers of strings and fabric.

KT

I met Kip Thorne for the third time at house dinner, and was reminded of how one of the reasons I took art class was because he said in one of his talks about his book that the drawing class he took at Caltech was the most useful class he’s ever taken.

Back to the future, my artistic journey had come full-circle, since I did a quick sketch of him during dinner and he signed the drawing with “Wow! — Kip, 05-13-26.”

He probably intended for his books to boost interest in the sciences, but I’ve really just gotten more into the arts.

Short-term Optimistic, Long-term Pessimistic

Part of the reason he came to house dinner was because he wanted some advice on what to talk about at the commencement speech he’s giving. He wants to get the opinions and views of juniors and seniors who are about to move into a chaotic job/grad school environment, primarily on AI.

We went around and discussed our future plans after graduation, as well as our concerns. It seems to be the case that AI is causing a variety of problems in society, primarily in the form of unemployment. Beyond that, social isolation and political division.

Even for those working in AI, who seem to have job security, upon some probing by Kip, it was undeniable that the issues extend far beyond personal job security.

Do you hear the gears turning?

Another thing we discussed was the crucial choice between industry/grad school, and how we plan to move forward given that AI may replace the more junior positions. I told him that I wanted to go into finance because there’s too much opportunity cost in going to grad school.

He asked about my concerns about AI affecting finance, and I responded that codemonkey positions will likely decrease, but that the shotcallers are not replaceable in any institution. He liked this framing, but I realize now that it doesn’t make much sense.

The issue with this is that junior employees cannot become shotcallers easily, and that it takes many years, whereas if you get a PhD, you can basically immediately become a senior shotcaller of sorts in industry.

However, if you get a PhD, then that means you’ll be a grad student, which means you’ll be a replaceable cog for a professor instead of a company.

Generally Relatively Good Relationship Advice

At the end, T asked Kip whether he regretted getting married after junior year of Caltech, and Kip said no, because he is still good friends with his ex-wife and sometimes goes on vacations with both her and his current wife.

Also, T asked for general relationship advice, to which Kip replied that everyone is different, and you shouldn’t expect to change other people in any major personality way, and that it’s important to be able to promote each other’s self-respect.

This was sort of hilarious because T’s partner, B was there, and I would love to go back in time just to look at B’s reaction.

Recommendations

The thing I find most troubling about AI is that it’s used for recommendation. Now, recommendation algorithms technically go back to applied linear algebra techniques, but the incorporation of AI has made it so that people accept whatever the algorithm gives them.

I remember a time on YouTube when I would be checking my subscriptions tab multiple times a day to see if my favorite channels uploaded anything. For a few years, I noticed that the homepage recommendation algorithm was constantly changing its technique, perhaps weights were being tuned behind the scenes.

But at some point between 2020 and 2023, the algorithm got advanced enough that the things it recommended were the things I wanted to see.

I fear that currently, the recommendations have become the things that they want me to see rather than what I want to see.

Cockroach Nest

It was just yesterday when my friend M who works at RD had to clean up a cockroach that was found under a couch.

CDS is known for having more expensive and less tasty food than basically every other school. However, the hygiene has also been called into question because of a Reddit post by a supposed ex-cook.

This is not news to anyone who looks at what the workers do when they cook. For instance, until very recently, they didn’t change their gloves between touching raw burger meat and grabbing a fistful of fries for you, or wrapping your burrito.

Also, on one of the only days with good food, the famed Curry Wednesday, they use the same spatula to stir every batch of curry before it is served. So, if you want vegan curry, or can’t eat beef for religious reasons, they are going to use that same spatula to mix your curry and someone’s beef & shrimp curry.

Oh yeah, and you can’t get off the meal plan, because it’s required for all undergraduates. So if you’re Muslim, you are getting scammed out of thousands of dollars and having pork-contaminated food shoved down your throat.

Rat Nest

Last weekend, Avery House conducted the first-ever storage cleanout.

The Avery storage is this musty area in the garage, about the size of two schoolbuses parked next to each other, where there are two sets of double-decker shelves: the right for construction stuff and the left for personal belongings. All of this is guarded by a wire fence and a keycode lock with 4-5 buttons.

The issue with this fence is that the space underneath has plenty of room for bugs and rats to get through¹.

Cardboard

As said in Jurassic Park, “Life will find a way…” Especially if it’s through cardboard.

The ingenuity of life severely affected the blankets of a girl who left them on the bottom deck.

We cracked the box open and found fur and little black-brown pills covering the blanket, with those red, blue, yellow Lindt chocolate wrappers all over. Yuck! But a good lesson in never storing food in places accessible to rats.

Based on the contents of that box, we decided to crack open all the boxes in hopes of more goodies. Among the numerous lucky blocks down there, we found about 8 large boxes of comics released around the 25th anniversary of Marvel, aged around 1985.

People started estimating the value of the comics, and the value got as high as dozens of thousands. However, after some AI estimation, the value seems to have dropped to a maximum of $5000, since 1985 is around the time when people started speculating on comic books in the hopes of making money. So, most of our comic books actually decreased in value, considering inflation.

We eventually cracked open a box of comics where there was a grey ball of fur inside. I thought it was rat fur, and I wasn’t wrong, but J picked it up and analyzed it, finding a tail, which suggests that it was actually an entire dead rat. I assume that the rat died and then dried up, causing its fur to become most of its volume.

Poop Dust

I² and A made great sacrifices for Avery House when they volunteered to sweep up the rat poop. I was wearing a N95 mask and A was wearing a regular mask.

A said that later when they blew their nose, it came out totally black, which seemed kind of nuts to me. Turns out the correct procedure is to first spray the poop with bleach or alcohol so that it doesn’t aerosolize.

I’m not sure how housing thought to allow us to clean out the storage, since they could be held liable for any injuries sustained by students doing what they should be doing.

Bird Nest

Life seems to hand me sidequests at the strangest times. I forgot which day this was, but in the same week as the storage cleanout, Z found a baby bird that fell out of its nest.

It was a hot afternoon, me and O went over to check it out and luckily it was in the shade of the staircase. I went to open kitchen to get some water and saw sunflower seeds, but O noted that the sunflower seeds were salted, which is very bad for birds. I actually never noticed they were salty, but I tasted them and they were indeed salted. So, we just got water.

We went back up the stairs and tried giving it some water on a plate, but it seemed very scared of us and hopped into the corner, behind some kind of structure with a valve. It might be a gas or a hose valve, but either way, it was good that it had enough energy to hop around.

O left, and R showed up to the staircase, recognizing the bird as a house finch, and stating that it may have been kicked out of the nest. After discussing what to do for 15 minutes, we called the non-emergency line and left, since we could hear birds all around us, but no birds coming over.

Dog Walk

I was doing laundry some weeks ago in the afternoon and ran into my friend K, and then we sat on the bench and talked for 30 minutes catching up with each other, and then we just decided to go get boba from Hoji. After that, it was basically dinner time, so we went to Chim!, a very nice Thai restaurant.

On the walk there, we ran into an old lady who was asking us to help hold down her dog. It was one of those small white dogs and the leash harness fell off somehow, and so I held down the dog for her while she put the buckle back into place. The dog was quite nice and didn’t resist much, but I am not too used to handling animals, since my family has never kept “real pets.”

After that, we ate at the restaurant and reminisced on how interesting that was. Some things happen completely by accident, not necessarily for any reason. Meeting up with an old friend, taking a neighborhood stroll, holding down an old lady’s little white dog: all of these serendipitous events never would have happened had I not ran out of underwear.

Silver and Gold

In the lounge UGT, we like to write random stuff on the whiteboard. During one point last year, we were very into inspirational quotes. Current senior D greatly enjoyed one that I came up with: “I searched for statues of bronze and chests of silver, but what I really needed was a heart of gold.”

At the time, I didn’t think much of this quote, but now that the seniors are graduating, we both began to think about it again. At the send-off dinner at Presdient Thai, all the seniors gave a little speech, and D used my little quote in his, which almost made me cry.

Taste and Flavor

This quarter, I took cooking class with some of my friends. It’s taught by Tom Mannion, one of the most interesting people in the world.

I didn’t enjoy it much at first, since it didn’t teach me anythig about cooking, but that’s because it’s not about cooking; it’s about eating. That, I enjoyed very much.

We won a challenge in the “Taste and Flavor” class where we were given little bits of many different foods and asked to make mini three-course meal. I think I clutched up on the dessert by not making a s’more like every other group. We had apple slices with honey on top, and a bit of chocolate, but my finishing touch of some small pieces of jalepeno definitely completed it. Jalepenos are very spicy, but sweetness counters spiciness, as we learned in the lecture. I think Tom must have appreciated that application of new knowledge.

For winning the challenge, we were treated to dim sum at a restaurant called 888 something in San Gabriel.

Bird Nest Pt. 2

As I was walking between my room and the laundry room in the shade on my last day in the oven heat of the Pasadena summer, I remembered when I got my Avery full membership under the alias of Washing Machine #31. Little did I know, there aren’t even that many washing machines on all of campus, probably.

I remembered a call I made to my bird enthusiast friend, J. I asked what might have happened to the bird to make it fall out of the nest, you know, “Did it get kicked out or did it roll out of bed like, Caltech style?” He laughed and said, “Probably the second.” By the way, security came with a ladder later that day and put the fledgling back in its nest in the roof structure, since it’s quite hard for an adult finch to lift anything.

They say home is where the heart is, but I think home is a place that gets harder to leave each time you return, which I hope is the case for that baby bird.

Anwyay, I looked at the sky and the hazy vibrations from the still eternal heat. “Someone else is also going to sweat like a dog on a day like this in 2027, 2028, and so on,” I thought. Sure, the sky may be a different blue, the diffraction of light different by a little bit, and it might be a day that “feels like 26 degrees” instead of 25, but I’m sure we’ll be feeling the same thing.

I looked down at the ground as I passed by the pillars back to my room. “They’ll have a different perspective than me, not knowing what lies ahead, or who walked on the same path as they did,” I thought. But do you know what they won’t know as they walk my path?

Beneath my feet, I saw some white spots and twigs under every pillar, which I used to think were splashes of paint left from some maintenance work, but nothing around it was painted white. I looked up from the pillar I stood under and what did I see? A bird’s nest above every pillar in the rafters.

Footnotes

1. Murphy’s Law ↩

2. The letter “I” is not me. ↩