A Bouquet of Dreams
多少痛苦，多少欢笑，交织成一片灿烂的记忆Reflections on EC3
EC3 has been a major part of my life for many years — since I first stepped into Chinese High in 2001, I have been continuously playing some role in it. The club was established in 1980, and has seen plenty of turmoil in its time, going through highs and lows year after year. 1990s was the supposed “prime” period, the age of glory for the club, when club members brought back trophy after trophy, winning competitions nationally and internationally. We had the best talent, and achieved the best results. We were entrepreneurial too, continually experimenting with lots of new things.
In 2001/2 it is commonly accepted that there was a lack of strong leadership, and the batch immediately senior to me was neither extremely talented nor extremely able to lead. This led to a kind of leadership “vacuum”, and under it the club started to stagnate. And then the club rose a little, and started declining again possibly in 2004 or 2005. I’m not too sure.
But now my juniors are starting to ask me what they should do with the club. Those are difficult questions to answer, and really depend on the situation — it must be really difficult to take the reins of the club into your own hands when you are only Sec 3. I took many years to gain some understanding of how the club works, and even then I don’t profess to have a full understanding of how the club works. It has been something that has constantly been on my mind in some form or another for the past six or seven years, and it is indeed a difficult issue. EC3 is entirely student-run, and its programmes are wholly due to the efforts of the students. There is no significant teacher intervention — if there is any, it is purely administrative in nature.
There are always certain “divides” within the club. The more talented members and the less able members tend to segregate themselves, their achievements (or lack of achievements) further pushing them in different directions. Therefore the less talented members sometimes feel less valued by the club — I’m not too sure how this is manifesting itself now. In any case, programming and web development tend to be quite solitary activities; the learning curve is so steep that you have to spend a lot of time learning individually and independently. It is really difficult to make the club members bond together; I believe that is one of the main problems facing the current ex-co now.
Difficult.
Nine Days
“To hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
and eternity in an hour.”
– William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
There are only nine days left to home, and I have a feeling that these nine days will seem like eternity. It’s exactly like cycling from Stanford to the Pacific Ocean — there is no choice but to ride over the insurmountable Skyline mountain range, 2400 feet of hard work. And some of my friends have already reached Singapore! I can’t wait to get on board the Singapore Airlines plane — an SQ flight means that you’re already one step closer to home when you step aboard the plane, just because it is Singapore Airlines.
And this is a photo of me, taken by Ching Hua, at the Marine Headlands:
Golden Gate Recreational Park
I went to Golden Gate Recreational Park yesterday, a huge park just beyond San Francisco. It was a beautiful place, especially with the low clouds tumbling around. For the first time in my life I experienced walking and biking (and driving) around in the middle of clouds… it feels kind of strange, some feeling straddling the thin line between the real and the unreal.
This photo could have come straight out of a Lord of The Rings movie… it was really amazing! Watching the clouds drifting and weaving through the trees is something quite impossible in Singapore. I could just sit there the whole day and be enchanted by the wispy clouds! I’d love to visit the place again.
Sixteen days to Singapore! I really can’t wait to clear the finals and start packing and get onto that plane. There are people I’d love to meet in Singapore, people whom I haven’t met for a really long time, people whom I’d like to talk to in person, and people with whom I’d like to share my experiences and just have a meal or two with.
Spring Quarter
Yesterday I awoke into Spring Quarter.
At least the drenching, ferocious storms of the moody winter are gone, replaced by light refreshing spring drizzles and cool breezes. The flowers are blooming; carpets of orange poppies lining the road, and the occasional patch of lavenders too. And on the nearby hills, entire slopes are blanketed by wearied, wind-hardened grass. This is what I have always wanted to experience in person: life in countryside blossoming with wild flowers. And Stanford, with its ideal suburban location, gives me exactly that.
But strangely, I don’t feel satisfied. These few days I seem to be extremely irritable, my emotions more and more volatile. For the second time in my life, I find myself subject to sudden “pangs” of anger or sharp dissatisfaction — “pangs” because I cannot find another more suitable or precise word to use. And it is getting increasingly difficult to suppress these feelings; nor do I really have anyone to converse to about them. Practicality seems to rule the day but it seems, too, to be driving me up the wall of impracticality — it is quite impractical to be irritable and therefore I should not be quick-tempered but that is not practically feasible sometimes. This meandering monologue with myself never ends.
Often I get irritated with myself for being irritated. This obviously makes me even more irritated — a self-perpetuating positive feedback cycle, dissecting it properly. Maybe it is because of the people around me. Everyone is nice and pleasant, alright; but except for a precious few, the majority of those smiles, those greetings, fail to strike me as anything other than superficial and forced. Where is the sincerity of it all? Is it even possible to be sincere? Given that classmates and dormmates are going to be classmates and dormmates for not longer than a quarter or an academic year, is there even a point in trying to get to know people better? There is always this unspeakable discomfort that hovers in the air whenever someone — a classmate or dormmate — says hi. And I can always predict the conversation topic even before the first words are spoken: How was your spring break? What classes are you taking this quarter?
There is never any variation; nor is there anything else to ask. But must we always ask so much? Rephrased: must we always ask so much of ourselves or others? Perhaps just knowing that someone is a friend is enough. Words are unnecessary. But sometimes I don’t know whether someone is still a friend, or not. Words unspoken are also the most garbled, the most brutally senseless words.
千古情愁酒一壶
人生无根蒂 飘如陌上尘
分散遂风转 此已非常身
落地为兄弟 何必骨肉亲
得欢当作乐 斗酒聚比邻
及时当勉励 岁月不饶人
现在我脑子就仿佛是一口枯井，一片空白。进入了苦海，只好拼命地力争上游，力求上进，希望可以把一切的伤心和委屈一笔勾消。
Returning Home
I’ll be returning home for summer in approximately three months. Singapore itself won’t have changed significantly; it will only have been nine months since I left. I don’t think my family will have changed much either.
But my friends might have changed. In these nine months, how have our relationships evolved? Some could possibly have improved; some have lapsed into utter silence. Others could have changed beyond recognition; changed into something which I won’t really want to believe. Not monstrous, just different. When silence inevitably envelopes a conversation, you will know that time has left a gaping vacuum in the relationship; time has split people apart and also brought people together. After having traversed the shores of the world, how does walking in Singapore feel like? I don’t know, and I don’t know what to expect either.
Friendships are like bridges; building and maintaining a long-lasting friendship requires effort from both sides. Sometimes, in the wake of desertion and desolation, in the face of new potential friends, it might be tempting to let go of old and existing friendships. It might seem like a daunting task to protect and grow these friendships, especially when distance — physical or emotional — is concerned. And indeed, some friendships end up like this, as mere rubble in the dusty entrails of time and history. Life continues.
But isn’t it such a waste for friendships to end up like this? Is friendship really that rivalrous, in the economics sense? Does being closer with someone necessarily dictate that one must drift away from someone else? Is friendship scarce? What does friendship mean in the long run? I don’t know the answers to these questions. Perhaps time will tell; the time that puts a teardrop in the eyes of the knowing.
Before I graduate…
Here is a list of things I’d like to do before I graduate from Stanford. Not all of them may be very realistic.
- Cycle from Stanford to San Francisco
- Cycle from Stanford to San Jose and back.
- Win a photography competition.
- Exhibit some of my photographs.
- Start a successful photography club.
- Get a DSLR.
- Walk through a field carpeted with colourful flowers.
- Perform Chopin’s Andante Spianato et Grand Polonaise Brilliante in front of an audience.
- Study the piano under Thomas Schultz.
- Attain a black belt in Taekwondo.
- Pick cherries at a cherry farm.
- Publish a paper in an academic journal.
- Spend one day doing what I want (other than studying), with absolutely no stress in mind.
- Learn how to improvise beautifully on the piano.
- Attain DipABRSM.
- Spend one quarter in Washington D.C. under the Stanford in Washington program.
- Improve my spoken and written Chinese until my Chinese standard is equivalent to my English standard.
- Bring my family on a tour around Stanford and San Francisco and fly home with them.
- Take a graduate-level Economics class and get an A in it.
- Visit Canada and Africa.
- Drive out of California.
And more! I should update this list as and when I have new ideas. For now, it’s back to doing CS103X homework. I’d like to finish my IHUM final paper by Friday night, and spend Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday primarily on CS103X. It is my main worry for next week…
A Bouquet of Dreams
I have done so much writing this quarter (at least 25,000 words) that the marginal effort required for me to sustain a blog is suddenly dwarfed into insignificance. And perhaps this is a good way for me to maintain my writing standard, because I’ll probably never be taking any future classes under Scott Herndon — unless, of course, I end up in his class again for PWR-2.
Then again, it feels nice to be able to blog again. You can call it escapism, in a way. Unlike in reality, here on this blank canvas I have the marvellous ability to create, to craft, to vandalize, to destroy; and every time round I end up with a new, equally blank canvas again. This may be, in some sense, a momentary alleviation from Newton’s third law: regardless of how hard I pummel this blog over and over again, it is unlikely that it will strike back at me with equal force. I treasure these daily pristine canvases that I have to paint on, and I should probably make full use of them.
Spring has finally arrived. Perhaps as a kind of loosely timed prelude to that, the Spring Quarter is also coming. But academics aside, I must say that spring is a wonderful season. It has brought with it an inexhaustible amount of brilliant sunshine, carpets of blooming flowers amidst luscious fields of green, and flocks of senselessly cheerful birds that perennially seem to be chirping. Carol, you’re right: sometimes when they chirp too much — incessantly — I do get a sudden urge to throw a book at them.
