Jumpstart

Reality is made of expectations

Caltech

I got into Caltech and I’ve heard that it is pretty hard, especially in the first year, so I was thinking of preparing for it by doing some more calculus problems. However, I don’t think anything can actually help me.

LA

I visited LA over my winter break and it was a lot of fun. I was able to meet one of my online friends at Caltech while I lived at the Athenaeum and walk around, it was a lot of fun! I was lucky to even be able to go because flights from the previous day got canceled due to storms in NYC.

Food

LA probably has one of the best Asian food scenes in the world, especially the dim sum places and Japanese places. Pretty sure all I did in California was sleep, walk, and eat.

Locations

Other than Caltech, I went to the Getty Art Museum, Huntington Museum/Garden/Library, and Hollywood. My family decided not to visit Disney or Universal Studios because it is smaller than the ones in Florida and my sister and I are a bit too old.

San Diego

San Diego is quite a far drive from LA, so I don’t think I will visit it much in the future.

Food

Unfortunately, there were no In-N-Outs near the hotel at La Jolla, so I was unable to eat that. The restaurants weren’t nearly as good as LA’s, but maybe I just didn’t find the right ones. It may be a lack of competition that caused the drop in taste.

Locations

There weren’t that many places that I went to. La Jolla was probably second best, while the park near the San Diego Zoo was probably the best area. There was a Japanese garden, but it was quite lackluster compared to the one at Huntington.

Overall, I think that this trip got me some nice blubber (like a seal), but I definitely need to continue to get fitter now that I am back home.

Habit of Unfocus

I’ve noticed recently that I misread words more often, which is very strange. Also, I become unfocused or forgetful of things that I should focus on. I’m not sure why this happens, but it might be that I am not getting enough sleep.

Memo booklets

I bought some mini notepads in LA, and I’ve been using them a little bit in order to keep track of what happens throughout the day. I don’t really like using them as journals because I only get to write a couple things and I generally like to go into detail, but I think that they are good for solving problems on the fly.

Laughing

Occassionally, I can be seen smiling or laughing a lot more than other people. This is because I find certain ordinary things funny.

Funny Misunderstanding

In AP CSP, which I am an assistant teacher in, there is a student in the front row who is close to a model student, other than how she sometimes misunderstands concepts. However, I believe that a model student does not need to do everything correctly or be very smart, but rather tries their best to learn more even if they do not understand.

Anyway, today we were learning about logic gates, and she could not understand why the OR gate’s truth table was TRUE when the inputs were both TRUE. I think that this was just some sort of fundamental misunderstanding, and that she would need to learn it from the basic idea of what a logic gate does.

Where it gets funny is that she was trying so many times even though she misunderstood every time, and I was smiling and laughing a bit toooo much. Her eyes were sort of saying, “Please don’t laugh :(“ because she thought I was laughing because I thought she was dumb. I should clarify that tomorrow, since, at the end of class, she said to her friend something approximating, “omg this class makes me feel so dumb,” which I probably had a part in.

Either way, I think this misunderstanding of misunderstandings is pretty funny.

9001 Takes

I keep recording videos and then immediately deleting them because I just don’t feel satisfied with them for some reason.

Civilization

When I record Civ 6, I try to discuss some personal stuff like I would do in a TF2 gameplay commentary, but Civ takes up so much attention that I just end up talking about the game.

When I try to record a tutorial for Civ 6 (even though I am not that good), I end up playing for too long continuously and then just giving up after a few mistakes.

College

Something I joke about is how I’m just going to become a “College Youtuber/Vlogger” but I do find the idea of making videos helping people applying to be a good use of time. However, I am not the type to write a script for videos where I just use MS Paint and a webcam, so I either end up talking for too long about something or I end up saying, “Umm, what was I talking about again?” too much because of the earlier point about my lack of focus.

Sometimes, a concept comes into my brain and then disappears, which feels really bad.

A list some concepts I want to include in videos:

• Timeline starting from 9th grade
• Timeline starting from 11th grade May 15th
• How to pick essay topic
• How to answer questions

The Moment Has Passed

Well, December break has ended, and the next break is in February, so I hope that I can keep going until then.

Some work I haven’t done yet:

• Presentation for my Finance + NLP project
• Reading bioinformatics papers about antibody design
• January Inklings ChatGPT article
• Editing my AP Lit paper
• Economics paper
• Economics practice

Soooo… Work time!