School has been going pretty smoothly lately! I finished two midterms already and I got a decent grade on math! =D

Other than that, I feel like I’ve been pretty on top of things lately. I’ve been sleeping before midnight, and not feeling sleepy in class! Last night was the worst (best?), since I ended up sleeping at around 10:30ish for my 9am.

The most recent BIE (exchange type thing) Japanese group just left for Japan again about a week ago. Pretty sad since they were here for 6 months! Pretty interesting experience too.

Isn’t it weird that when everything seems to be going right, it feels wrong?

“But it’s at 3am! There’s no point waking you up!”

“But I want to see it!! You have to wake me up okay?!”

I was excited. I had never seen a lunar (or was it solar? hmm…) eclipse before. I was determined not to miss out on the rare event, and I was so nervous that I would miss it that I couldn’t fall asleep. Time seemed to pass by slower than ever as I lied in bed, but soon enough I was asleep.

“Wake up! I can see it! Let’s go! Didn’t you say you wanted to see it?”

The sudden loud voice of my dad broke through the silence and I woke up slightly confused. I had no idea what he was talking about and all I wanted to do was go back to sleep. He pulled me out of bed and because I was groggy, I forgot to put on my glasses. I didn’t realize I had forgotten my glasses until we were downstairs and out the door, but right when I stepped outside, I also realized I didn’t need my glasses. It was beautiful. It was a giant, bright orange blob of light in the sky. The slightly blurred edges and extended beams of light made it all the more beautiful, and I was glad I had left my glasses behind. The fuzziness added to it’s wonder; to witness something that awesome made me tingle with happiness.

“What are you looking at? It’s over here.”

Confused, I turned around and realized that my dad was pointing towards the opposite of where I had been looking, and that the actual eclipse was nothing like I thought it was. Without my glasses, I could only see a dim reddish spot in the sky. I pretended to be in awe while sneakily looking back towards what I was originally staring at: a lamp post.

This break has probably been one of the most enjoyable for me, although a lot of not so good things happened also. But! I was able to hang out with home friends a lot more than usual, and just being home is doing a lot to help me stay calm and motivated. I feel like I never want to go back to Berkeley.

I have really changed my mindset since sophomore year though. Now I feel like I’ve been trying a lot harder to just enjoy Berkeley and be okay about being there. And it’s working. But coming home twice a year reminds me that Berkeley isn’t quite the standard I should be holding myself to. People in Berkeley seem to be chasing their own dreams and don’t quite care if you follow along or not. Somewhere along the way I think I got caught up and tried to make unrealistic goals for myself, comparing my goals to other people’s, and thinking I had to follow along this written-in-stone path. I’ve always been a follower. Following everyone else’s expectations of me is how I’ve always made my decisions, because I’ve never made my own. I am indecisive. I am more indecisive than most, so it becomes relatively easy to just let someone else take the wheel. When it comes time for me to actually step up, though, I tend to choke and pick what I think would benefit someone else.

I think I need to relax and take everything one step at a time. It’s time to pursue things because I find interest in them, not because it’ll get me somewhere in the future, or because it’s what most people do, but because I’d like to end up somewhere enjoyable to me, not someone else’s dream. I hope when I read this post in the future, I won’t feel like I’m lying to myself.

Please tell me things worked out all right. I hope you grew a pair and swallowed your pride and fear.

To start things off, I did not get to read Godel, Escher, Bach, nor did I do problems from that one challenge book, but I did learn Java (cs61bl in the summer). I did not laugh until I cried, but I did have more fun and learn to let go much better.

In 2011, I have felt gut-wrenching embarrassment, betrayal of supposedly really good friends, the unending guilt of betraying someone’s trust, and the feeling that sometimes, things don’t actually work out in the end if you don’t put in sufficient effort.

I became infinitely closer with my two roommates, Whitney and Christina, and our adventures are always fun and exciting. Haha, really, I don’t think Fall semester would have been as awesome without them ;]. Along the same lines, Cynthia and I had many more McDonald’s adventures, and talking with her keeps me sane.

I fell in love with swing! Kind of. I am too embarrassed to dance in public.

I just realized writing a reflection post is boring to me. =[ Hmm… a little change is in order. I hope the last six months of this site will be more entertaining to me than the posts from the past year and a half.

Okay, maybe I am exaggerating a little bit. I wasn’t on the active lookout to find it, but it certainly was on my mind! Almost every day, my dad and I have been taking walks to various places: Sears, Northgate Market, Carlton’s (sp?) Market, Valley Boulevard. One day, was we set out to Northgate Market to get more carrots to feed our wild bunnies, I mentioned really wanting chocolate pudding. We walked all the way there, and lo and behold, NO CHOCOLATE PUDDING! There wasn’t even the powder do-it-yourself kind! I was flabbergasted. No chocolate pudding at a market? Nonsense. On our way back home we stopped by Carlton’s Market (which I think is closing down soon? They have no customers! D:). Again, no chocolate pudding. The next day we walked to Walgreens on Valley. No chocolate pudding. The world was against me.

I have no idea how to end this dramatically, so I will just tell it how it was. We crossed the street illegally to Food 4 Less, and they had chocolate pudding. Did this adventure make the pudding taste better? It certainly did.

Keep in mind this is a speech, and it has to have some research and teach the judges about something of your choosing. Here goes:

Imagine walking into your room or office and finding everything a complete mess. Papers thrown everywhere, clothes scattered all over the floor. You decide to clean up and reorganize everything, and that takes the entire day to complete. You promise to keep it neat and tidy, but a week later, everything is just as messy as it was before, and you find yourself rolling up your sleeves to do it all over again. Disorganization happens all around us; we just don’t think about or notice it. When a bowl falls and breaks into pieces, when you mix hot and cold water, and even when you make Kool-Aid, you’re dealing with disorganization. The way to measure disorganization is through entropy. Entropy measures disorder, and the higher the disorder, the higher the entropy.

When you pour hot water into cold water, the hot water doesn’t just stay in one corner. It spreads out, moving around and mixing with the cold water molecules and creating disorganization. The result is equilibrium, or warm water. It reaches equilibrium because the fast-moving hot water molecules bump into the slow-moving cold water molecules and create medium-paced warm water molecules. It is true that entropy, or disorganization, keeps getting higher and higher until it reaches equilibrium and is unable to become any more disorganized. In fact, the idea of disorder increasing until equilibrium is actually better known as the second law of thermodynamics.

Another example would be if I had a new can of lemon-scented air freshener and started to spray the entire can in that corner. At first, all that lemony freshness would stay in that corner and only I would be able to smell it. But slowly, the smell of the air freshener will move towards the other corners of the room and you would be able to smell it too. The smell would keep spreading until every inch of this room smelled lemony fresh, and when that happens, entropy has reached its max and is at equilibrium because the molecules are now spread evenly throughout the room.

Now theoretically, all that lemony scent can eventually bump around and move back to the original corner, but the chances of that are so low that we can say it’s impossible. Entropy seems to go only one way, toward a state of higher disorder. When a diver dives into a pool of water, all that water that the diver displaces can suddenly move back and push the diver back out of the water and onto the diving board, but it has never happened. One common example is a melting ice cube. Water molecules in an ice cube are solid and stable, but as it melts the molecules become disorganized and start to lose the ice cube shape. Soon a puddle of disorganized water molecules is all that’s left, and the puddle won’t be able to turn back into an ice cube by itself.

So if everything in this world is trying to reach maximum entropy, or disorganization, what will happen to our lives? Our planet? Our universe? The answer is that eventually we will reach the heat death of the universe. This means that there will be no difference between hot and cold. Everything would be the same temperature. We won’t be able to do any “mechanical work,” like moving our hands, walking, picking things up, speaking, and even breathing. You might be wondering what heat has to do with moving around, and there is a simple explanation for that. The sun shines its rays on a field of grass. The grass uses the heat energy from the sun to grow and flourish. The cows in turn eat that grass to grow big and fat. We humans then turn the cows into hamburgers to eat. When we eat the hamburger, we get energy from it, and use that energy to move around and pick things up. If we were to ever reach the heat death of the universe, nothing would live. Luckily for us though, the chances of reaching the heat death of the universe is once in many many lifetimes of our universe.

So even though our world is bent on disorder, we manage to create order. We make things more efficient, like computers, refrigerators, light bulbs, and cars. But more surprisingly, we do this naturally through evolution. All living things are so complex and organized it’s a wonder how life was created. In the face of increasing disorder and chaos we living things have managed to find a way to become more complex, more organized, and more intelligent.

I attempted to quit my job, but now am working reduced hours. My last midterm will be this upcoming Monday, which will be the deciding point of how well I do in 113 (abstract algebra). I love math. I tell myself that quite a lot, but now I know I’ve been quite delusional. I recently switched my applied math major to math with a teaching concentration because, honestly, I think that’s what I really want to do. I am never going to go far into the math field or make any major contributions, and from the very beginning, I never intended to. Fortunately all the math classes I’ve taken so far have been required for the teaching concentration, but unfortunately I will need to take 3 more classes than originally planned in order to get the degree.

As for CS, I honestly do like it, and I’m hoping by switching my math major I can spend more time with CS instead of letting it sit on the back burner. Math 128a (numerical analysis) is actually the math class I’ve enjoyed the most out of the math classes I’ve taken so far, but it’s so confusing! -__- The book might as well be written in a foreign language. The ideas in the class are interesting, though.

SwingCal beginner 2 has been fun. Much more fun than beginner 1. I’m going to miss swing dancing quite a lot when I don’t have the class next semester =[.

I supposed that’s my update for school. Hopefully other updates coming soon after my midterm. This is a great way to destress; it’s like organizing my thoughts and seeing how silly I’ve been. I wonder where we’ll all be in 3 years.

I am still a compulsive hoarder, and I still find great contentment in being alone.