Bringing in Spring: Some outdoorsy places to go

I definitely had this conception that spring in Budapest would be a dull affair. Partly because in New York, the idea of a slow and steady rise in temperature to summer is nonexistent. It will be eighty on a day in February before snowing in April. And just when the weather seems like it’s getting nice… BAM it’s summer and every day is an exercise in avoiding heat strokes in muggy ninety degree weather.

So it’s been nice to experience something like what I imagine spring SHOULD be: warm, sunny, maybe a little rainy, with steady temperatures ranging from 50-70 degrees. Spring in Budapest is BEAUTIFUL.

Ah, who am I kidding? Budapest is always beautiful 🙂

It’s hard to stay inside when the weather is so nice. Studying outside may be a little counterproductive, but you gotta maximize your time in the sun somehow.

So I’ve been walking more instead of taking public transport, going to parks, etc.

City park: it was okay in the winter but now it is GREEN. A good place to study if you don’t need a table.

Also, the statues scattered throughout the city look more regal cloaked in green (or whatever…)

On the Pest side of the Danube, there are tons of statues scattered in interesting places/poses. My FAVORITE kind of park is a statue park.

Queen Erzsébet looking regal (in the Buda side, by the citadel)

In terms of some concrete recs, I have three, ranging from easiest to hardest to get to. First: go to the ELTE botanical gardens! The gardens are in Pest, an easy tram ride away, and the student price is only 600 forints. If you go on a weekday morning the gardens will be relatively empty and you can study/read/chill/admire the greenery to your heart’s content. One caveat though: weekdays are also the days school kids take field trips to the gardens, so be cognizant of that!

Fragrant wisteria grows everywhere in the spring and might be one of my favorite things about spring at this point…

And here we have the requisite Asian garden.

Second: head to the Buda Hills! Some friends and I went to Normafa for Labor Day and picnicked there before hiking around the hills. It was honestly kind of shocking how beautiful it was given how easily accessible the hills are from downtown. Also, picnic food is the best food (proof: all things are better outside in 60-70 degree and sunny weather, therefore, food is better in nice weather outside).

It’s really too bad I couldn’t get a picture of the food. We ate on a grassy hill that made me feel like I was in a Monet painting

Walk around enough in the hills and you will stumble across this cool tower with sick views.

Sick views! Also the Hungarian flag.

Finally, I can see why everyone raves about Pécs. With wide plazas, a Mediterranean feel (must’ve been those occasional palm trees), and tons of art and history scattered through the city (also Roman ruins) it’s just a cool place to walk around. We took a day trip to the city and had a lovely (albeit also sweaty- should not have worn jeans) time taking in the sites, views, sun.

I don’t think photos do this building justice. It was VERY impressive in real life.

It’s weird to know that the semester is wrapping up, and weird to think about the fact that I’ll soon be leaving Budapest with no idea if/when I’ll be back.

We won’t think about that for now!!

Happy Spring!

Help Wanted: An Epistemological Concern

I need help. Problems in philosophy are as old as time, and what I’m doing I’m sure is just putting my own personal spin on a conundrum that many, many people have encountered. Nevertheless, I’d love some guidance about how to approach the issue.

I lived in Korea for seven years on Yongsan Garrison, an American military base in the middle of the capital city, Seoul. I graduated from both Seoul American Middle School and Seoul American High School, living, studying, and growing up between the sluggish base and the bright Korean metropolis.

Prior to moving to Seoul, we moved from place to place, spending no longer than 2-3 years in each location. Once we left, we never returned. All I have left of each location I grew up are the memories of those places (and of course, the corroborating accounts of the people in my family who moved with me).

Once I graduated high school, I left Seoul to go to college in New York. As of today, I have spent about three years away from the place where I spent my formative years. With one exception (a one-week reunion with my best friend from high school) I have not had any direct contact with anyone I knew in Korea who isn’t my direct family. The only remnants I’ve seen of my life in Korea are the occasional social media updates that old teachers and students post.

You might be getting some idea about where this story is going. It’s going to take a dramatic turn. The US Military has recently declared that Yongsan Garrison will close in 2019. The place where I did the most growing up is going to be wiped off the face of the map and replaced with a park. Politically speaking, this move was a long time coming. Americans really don’t need to be occupying the most valuable real estate in Korea with a bunch of ugly, outdated military buildings from the 50s.

This is pretty nostalgia-worthy on its own, but more importantly, it got me thinking about the criteria we use to verify our own memories. Let’s say that I have coffee with my friend Matt at Coffee Shop X at time T. A day later, I want to verify that the thing that I remember, this memory I have of drinking coffee with Matt, actually occurred. An obvious thing to do would be to find Matt and see if he has the same memory, and if it accords with mine, then conclude that this is enough evidence for my memory to have happened.

But if the issue at hand is that I want to have some criteria of verifying my own (human) memory, then it doesn’t really make any sense to use someone else’s own (human) memories as evidence for the veracity of mine. The thing that bothers me about this solution is that I’m looking for an independent criterion to verify my own memory, one that doesn’t depend on the memories of others.

So the next obvious thing for me to do is to return to Coffee Shop X. By doing this, I can examine the way the coffee shop looks and smells, its location, the hardness of the tables, even the taste of the coffee I ordered, and if this sensory evidence accords with my memory of coffee yesterday with Matt, then it seems that I have some way of independently establishing some kind of evidence for the veracity of my memories.

It seems to me that at least superficially, something important is to be gained by going back to the location that we remember memories taking place. Which is where my own conundrum comes in:

Going back to the location of my memories of my middle and high schools is unavailable to me. All physical evidence of the base will be gone (well, not entirely: as I understand a museum of the history of the base will be built in the park, but for the purposes of this discussion that doesn’t seem too relevant). If going back to the location of a memory is a good way to independently verify memories, then how can I verify the memories I have of living on base and going to school there for seven years?

To make this more concrete, I want to give a toy example. Let’s say in high school, I hid a pencil somewhere in my school (perhaps in a secret compartment in one of the walls) and didn’t tell anyone about it. Nobody but me knows, and there is not the slightest chance that anyone but me will find the pencil. Once the school is gone, the physical evidence of my hiding the pencil is also gone. The surest way for me to independently find evidence for the truth of my memory (i.e., finding the pencil) is also gone. Is the memory of my hiding the pencil any less legitimate than my memory of making my bed in the morning, which can be easily verified by walking into my room and seeing my bed made?

Whether going back to the location of a memory and examining the physical evidence to verify a memory is enough evidence to judge the veracity of a memory is a good question. In discussions with friends and professors, it seems like a common line of reasoning is that all human experiences that are not occurring at this very moment are memories. Since everything is in flux, and no memory’s setting is exactly the same when we revisit it, no memories can be trusted and so my dramatic case is no different from the ordinary case. Not being able to confirm our memories is just a fact we have to deal with.

But this objection doesn’t negate the central worry: it only provides a degree of graduation. Surely, when we recognize the setting of a memory, it means something. Even if we can’t accept the idea that we can completely verify a memory’s veracity, if the feeling of recognition exists, then being able to go back to the setting of a memory and gaining that bit of evidence provides more certainty than otherwise. So are my memories less legitimate than the memories of someone who can go back to their old school and find the pencil that they hid there?

So, to sum it up, here are the questions I have: what, if any, are good ways to independently verify that memories have occurred? If revisiting the setting of a memory is a good way to do this, then does it follow that my memories of high school are less legitimate than the average high school memory (because I have less of a setting to go back to than others)? Is there then a way for me to “reclaim” my memories? Is there something I’ve missed or haven’t considered thoroughly yet?

I’d love to hear your point of view or perhaps some written sources about this conundrum. It’s difficult to sift through the wealth of epistemological work without some guidance (and I’m sure this problem has been discussed at length many times). Thanks in advance!

The Right Way to Eat Korean Barbecue

Or: Life Lessons from a Bunch of Tasty Meat

Korean barbecue is a phenomenon that has thankfully become a phenomenon here, which is fortunate because I was not about to give up my grilled meat when I came back the States. During the seven years I lived in Seoul, Korean barbecue happened at least once every two months or so (whenever my Korean grandfather came to visit, for instance, which was often).

Oh, the gluttonous joy that came from these meals. Koreans are experts at stuffing themselves, and a typical KBBQ experience entailed stuffing myself with enough meat, rice, and side dishes to explode… and then finishing the evening with one or two more gut-busting noodle and soup courses before sprawling on the floor and stacking the mats as pillows to snooze off the calories (the only reason this was okay was because I was pretty young- not recommended for general audiences). We did this often, and we went hard. It’s a total Korean experience, the full package.

Anyway, I was talking to a poor soul from rural Iowa and who insisted that there is no such thing as Korean barbecue there. Skeptic that I am, I googled Korean barbecue places in Des Moines, and unfortunately, this is what came up:

I kind of wanted to laugh when I saw that the top result was “Le’s Chinese Bar-B-Que” but instead I kind of died a little on the inside instead. Iowans, this is a significant market opportunity! Bring KBBQ to Iowa!

So this conversation led me to believe that there exists a non-trivial cohort of Americans who have never had the true KBBQ experience. There are a number of “guides” for eating Korean barbecue online, but for the most part these are just descriptions of what’s going to come out, with very few if any practical guides for how to enjoy the food the most. Far and away the best thing I found at KimchiTiger (which by the way is an awesome blog with content I can really get behind) here: https://kimchitiger.com/blogs/all/18063299-how-to-eat-korean-bbq-like-a-korean.

The article is great, but there are a few finer points I think it misses. First of all, most KBBQ tips advise getting samgyupsal (pork belly) or kalbi (marinated short rib), both of which are delicious and worth trying. But it’s also worth noting that samgyupsal tends to be one of the cheapest options, while kalbi is going to be one of the more expensive things on the menu.

Also, nobody seems to talk enough about dyejigalbi (marinated pork ribs) enough! When we lived in Korea, it was the only thing we ordered when we went out for barbecue. It’s all the tender deliciousness of marinated meat that you get with beef, minus some of the expense. Also sometimes I’m just not feeling the greasy pork belly feeling.

The other thing I love about the KimchiTiger article is it actually shows you how to use ssam to make your little lettuce package of joy, which is something so Korean that all your Korean friends will be shocked if you do it out of the box (assuming you’re not Korean, of course).

But the personal beef (heh) that I’m going to bring up is that the major mistake people make when they eat Korean barbecue is to assume there’s a right way to eat Korean barbecue. Aha, the clever ruse of the title has been exposed!

I don’t know, maybe when you’re eating a filet mignon it’s not really proper to chop it into little pieces and mix it with the salad or something. But the best way to approach Korean barbecue—and Korean food in general—is to take advantage of the extraordinary wealth of options that come in the form of all these delicious side dishes and accompaniments and really experiment to find something delicious.

Try eating a piece of meat with just the marinated onions. Then try doing that plus a piece of kimchi, or maybe a spoonful of buckwheat noodles (nengmyun). Or maybe you’ll dip it in ssam-jang and sample with a sesame leaf, or eat it with a piece of tofu, or maybe you’ll put five different side dishes and three pieces of meat on a lettuce leaf (which you must eat whole—no bites).

My point is, there are really no wrong answers. Probably the worst thing you could do while eating Korean barbecue is to assume there is a right answer and deprive yourself of the opportunity of mixing and matching so many different flavors and textures. (who knew such a delicious medium could be a metaphor for life?)

And if at the end of the day the mixing and matching doesn’t do it for you, then by all means feel free to revert back to dipping the meat in salt/oil and eating it with rice (just know that people like me who live for flavor combinations will definitely judge you for this).

Just don’t do anything too weird, like eating your chopsticks, and if you find a flavor combination that is delicious then I’m sure your table companions will applaud you.

The God Complex

The pressure of a college math exam manifests (at least, for me) in sweaty palms, a racing heartbeat, tunnel vision—no matter how many hours I’ve studied, no matter how well I think I know the material, when I see the ten pages of five problems (my grade in the class hinging on my ability to solve them in a little over one hundred minutes) I have to fight down the panic rising from my chest.

I’m convinced that one of the biggest secrets to doing well on tests like these (and in other high pressure scenarios—for example, job interviews, speeches, etc.) is the ability to act like—or know that—the task at hand is a piece of cake. This confidence bordering on arrogance allows the best students to plunge headlong into a math test where we all know the average will be a straight up 30% allows them to attack the problems, despite the fact that they (as well as the rest of the class) will fail to answer most of them correctly.

I’ve done the best on tests where I was able to channel this confidence into steadying my hand and clearing my head. I made fewer mistakes, didn’t second-guess myself into the wrong answer. Convincing myself that I was going to do well was half the battle in actually doing well—and the other half was the hard work I had spent preparing myself beforehand.

It’s a funny thing, this confidence-arrogance. This fall, when I interviewed for a glitzy finance internship despite the fact that I hardly knew what a bond was, I mercilessly quashed my more natural self-doubt and strode into the interview with as much self-assuredness as I could muster. Instead of trying to balance humility and confidence, I threw caution to the winds and, at least to my ears, sounded like an arrogant prick. My overcompensation was rewarded—evidently, what I thought was arrogance was to my interviewers a nice healthy dose of confidence.

It wasn’t until I was describing this strange phenomenon to my dad, walking around the lake near our house in the muggy summer heat, that he finally put a name to this phenomenon: a God Complex.

Having a God Complex isn’t a great thing. Here’s what Urban Dictionary says: “A psychosis based in uncontrolled narcissism, inflated arrogance and a perceived need to subjugate and/or ridicule other individuals deemed to be inferior or unworthy.” People with God Complexes are said to be psychopaths.

But in high pressure scenarios, particularly if it’s general knowledge that the outcome will be bad for most people, the God Complex is an indispensable asset—at least, in a milder form.

At this point, it’s difficult not to gender the issue. I first observed the usefulness of the Mild God Complex in a setting that is inherently gender biased—the math major is heavily skewed towards males, as are most STEM majors at universities. I’ve walked into math society meetings and math prize exams—rooms actually filled with major students—where I am one of only two or three women. I can’t help but think that this Mild God Complex, this confidence-arrogance—is a trait that, like having a deeper voice or bigger physiques, gives men in general the edge in high-pressure scenarios like math exams or finance interviews.

Statements like this warrant more thorough research, but it seems that in general women are more likely to be the ones who doubt their own abilities, or temper their confidence with self-doubt. I know that at least for me, striving towards having a Mild God Complex has helped me through scenarios where my own lack of confidence would have been detrimental.

There is always the question about how much is too much, but what I’ve noticed is that I’ve still got a long way to go before I have to worry about being too arrogant—my brain is so hardwired towards self-deprecation that it takes all the God Complex I can muster to let go of that doubt.

Like most things, a work in progress.

Regalo

Tarragona in March is chilly. Luckily, the day was bright and the sun glittered on the turquoise water. The Roman ruins dotted across town look over the coast, and a few locals took in the early spring sunshine in fragrant parks next to the amphitheater or on the breezy beach. Hungry from traipsing around the empty stone ruins, we ventured into the town, down a rough-and-tumble road, stopping at the first deli-café hybrid we stumbled across–

A hole in the wall, with a menu written only outside and featuring hamburgers, platos, sandwiches. The three of us ordered bocadillos with jamón. The friendly café owner had kind eyes, and the place was empty save one other person sipping café con leche and reading the paper. He brought out our bocadillos, spread with tangy tomato sauce on crispy baguettes. Jenny had ordered a café con leche, delicious with the baguette. It was too late in the day for caffeine, but I was trying to pin down a craving.

“How much would a cup of milk cost?” I asked in meager Spanish. The owner smiled— “Don’t worry. Un regalo.” A present. In that tiny café in Tarragona, Spain, I enjoyed warm, creamy milk with my bocadillo.

Arguably it was just a cup of milk. What about the regalo made it so special?

 

Regalo—faithful Google says it comes from the old French word for “galer” or “to make merry, to amuse, to rejoice” Etymologically speaking, a regalo is at its heart something that makes us happy. Our English word “gallant” comes from the same root, apt when the verb became the adjective for “bold or amusing one.”

In English, the word “gift” or “present” implies a special occasion. It tastes like frosting and ice cream, sounds like the crinkle of wrapping paper on a snowy morning. Gifts are surprises from those that care about you, or maybe quid pro quo for the invitation. Gifts happen sparingly, so sparingly that I was euphoric when my mind automatically translated the café owner’s “regalo”—it was my lucky day!

An English speaker would have used some sort of idiom—like “on the house”—to describe the free milk. Perhaps Spanish speakers see the word “regalo” as the same, and my English-wired brain perceives the use of that particular word as something special merely because of the way that standard English-Spanish dictionaries translate it. Maybe I’m ascribing English nuances to Spanish words.

But wouldn’t it be a nice thought if “regalo” is used because of its special connotations? That is, we can find small regalos in everyday life, things that we don’t have to wait once or twice a year for, that can make us incontrovertibly happy? We don’t have to spend a lot of money or take a lot of time to give a regalo that will brighten someone’s day. If a shop owner with kind eyes can, in a single moment, simply hand a complete stranger (and tourist, to boot) a cup of milk as a regalo, what’s to stop any of us from giving simple regalos away?

Regalos don’t have to be complex, or beautiful. They can be simple and spontaneous, bringing nothing but happiness to the receiver.

 

Sources: https://www.etymonline.com/word/gallant

https://spanishetymology.com/regalo-and-gala-gallant/

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/regalar

The Price of Vanity

My mother’s catchphrase is “beauty is pain.” Implicit in the motto is that beauty is (obviously) worth the pain. For her, a woman who grew up deprived of both male companionship and the joys of female preening (she sported a bowl cut in an all-girls’ school for eleven years), the acts of plucking, polishing, blending, lining—are all part of the regular maintenance of a woman. In a word, like keeping your car washed or your lawn trimmed.

And my mother is beautiful. The day of bowl cuts and baggy clothes are long gone. Like a fine wine, she’s grown sweet and oaky. Growing up, I was often confused for her sister. If I were her sister, then I was the gawky one next to her flawless face and trim body.

She, however, always insisted I was beautiful. In the classically Korean modus operandi, all of our family and friends agree. I’ve been called pretty for as long as I can remember, my height grounds for becoming the next “Miss America,” for as long as I’ve been in the 99^th percentile.

There is a subtlety at play here: you can be told you are beautiful as much as you like. But it will never improve your self esteem unless you actually believe it. The trap is this: you refuse to believe such a thing, partly because society has told you this is unacceptable, but mostly because you know that if you do, you will become the world’s most insufferable pretentious bitch.

But, paradoxically, if you don’t make peace with your own inner or outer beauty, every time you hear the words “how pretty!” they will do nothing but fuel your vanity.

Key point: low self-esteem and vanity are not mutually incompatible. In fact, they downright fuel each other.

Vanity, unlike self-confidence, is needing to be the prettiest person in the room because you were told that you are. Vanity is looking in the mirror too much because you are afraid you won’t be the prettiest. Truly self-confident people don’t need to look—they are self-assured enough to know that whatever some reflective surface might say, they’ll retain their intrinsic beauty and worth.

What I inherited from my mother and everyone else who had a nice thing to say about my looks is not self-confidence, but a fundamental sense of vanity fueled by my own lack of self-worth.

Beauty is not pain. The vanity that comes from “beauty” is pain.

 

What are the immediate consequences? Let’s talk about one obvious one: love. If you are self-confident, similarly self-confident people will be attracted to your aura. No matter what you look like physically, you’ll glow with assurance.

If you’re vain, you will attract everyone who looks with their eyes. The price of vanity is love. What I get in return for exchanging the potential to love somebody good, and true, is my constant judgment of everyone who doesn’t maintain themselves as well as I think they should. People look at me with their eyes, but I look back just as much, with standards that are not only unrealistic, but harmful to everyone I impose them on.

Thus, love and vanity are mutually incompatible. The tired old idiom is true. If you can’t see your own inner beauty, how could you possibly see that in others? Vanity is the poison that stops us not only from loving ourselves, but also from loving others.

 

I’ve been working on curbing my vanity. Walking on my street, my head flicks towards any reflective surface—like an owl spotting a vole. Nowadays I try as best as I can to turn away from those reflective car mirrors, resisting the urge to critique my figure in every glass door I pass. These are small steps. There is still much work to be done.

But I’m grateful for having taken the first step: realizing the price of vanity, and, more importantly, that it’s not a price I’m willing to pay anymore.

That time I confessed to my crush.

Some weeks ago, I executed a groundbreaking personal experiment. I confessed my feelings to my crush.

Some background:

In general, I tend to be (or at least, try to be) pretty vivacious and social. I like to think that I have (and use) some sort of sense of humor, and I genuinely enjoy talking to people and getting to know them.

Too bad all that goes out the window if I start being romantically interested in someone. I become downright mean. Or awkward. Or both. I can’t joke with them, I clam up. I get serious. Maybe even mean. If I like someone, for some reason my visceral instinct is to convey to them that I don’t like them.

Worst of all, I think I’m deeply suspicious of love in general. If I’m romantically interested in someone, for some reason my brain (and my deep set impatience) skips the friendship and goes straight to the lovin’. And suddenly this crush on a pedestal is on trial instead—would I really want to spend the rest of my life with this person? How will he react to all my hidden secrets? Should I let him in?

And then my brain kicks in: no, girl, no. Don’t let him in (you’re only going to have to kick him out again, as Dua Lipa would say).

Anyway, to return to the incident: there was some buildup here. Crush and I had seen each other rather regularly starting last semester, and I had always kind of thought he was cute (but not in the obsessive crush way—at least, not at that point). We texted a couple of times and gave each other fist pumps every so often. We hung out a little at parties and even went to the same early morning workouts for a club we were both in (we had so much in common, or so I liked to think).

Anyway, my friends noticed and the customary egging of the girlfriends began— “Oh, I think he likes you.” … “Ohmigosh you should ask him out” … and so on.

Suffice to say that at that point I was completely off the diving board and into the deep end. I was obsessed with Crush. I’m still not far removed enough from the incident to admit that I read into things that shouldn’t have been read into. But I probably read into things that shouldn’t have been read into.

But I’ve been through this song and game before. I’d become obsessed with a crush, think about him for days (or… weeks), and do absolutely nothing (out of a mixture of fear and general ineptitude) and wait for the guy to fall off the pedestal when I saw him pick his nose or something.

Anyway, it was on the one train uptown when I realized that the problem with this approach is that, while it makes sense to wait for something to happen naturally, I end up beating myself up over the crush. I don’t give myself any rest.

And I was agonizing over Crush. Like thinking about whether I should have gone to a party last night to get a chance to see him. Or whether I should have worn something different, or said something more exciting to him the last time I saw him.

And keep in mind—I barely knew this guy. Objectively—in my brain—I knew we were pretty different people. But my heart kept reassuring me that we were essentially soul mates.

So on the rickety subway uptown, it suddenly occurred to me—in the midst of all this agony—that this can’t be healthy for the brain, and that I had spent enough time thinking about Crush. There had to be a way to end it. And I knew there was. If I could just straight up ask if he was interested, then I would get an answer—either Crush would admit that he, too, fantasized about running his fingers through his soft, curly hair—I mean, my hair—or I would get a No. And I would be humiliated.

I whipped out my phone. Without thinking too hard, I dashed out a “are you free today or tomorrow.” The subway was underground. No service. For about three stops I stared at the screen, wondering whether or not I should take the leap. The service bars on my phone flitted in and out of existence. On the fourth time I saw three bars—I forced my thumb down and sent the text.

The response was immediate. “Yeah, why?”

It wasn’t too late to back out. I could still flake. But at that moment I had decided that humiliation was better than perpetual agony. At the very least, humiliation was a familiar enemy I felt like I knew how to deal with.

The hardest thing I’d done at that point in 2018 was make myself send the crucial text: “Can we have dinner tonight or lunch tomorrow?” I told Crush there was “something important” I needed to tell him.

He suggested coffee. I tried not to think about the fact that the time between messages got longer and longer from his end.

The hour of coffee was upon us. I spent the day prep-talking myself into not being a nervous wreck (I did a pretty good job of it, if I do say so myself—I was pretty calm). I told myself the typical nervous-girl lines—I am a CATCH and if he doesn’t think so it’s NOT my problem—and so on. It helped that I was reading Wollstonecraft that day, too.

The worst thing that could happen, I told myself, was that he would express disinterest. And then, presumably, I could get on with my life. The key, the most crucial point, was that I could replace agony with embarrassment.

To make a long story short, the beginning of our brief one-and-a-half-hour coffee date was extremely awkward. He was nice about it, apologizing and talking about how great I was but.

I kept a careful watch on my own emotional state. Surprisingly, I had put myself in a mindset where I refused to be embarrassed. I got my answer, and it was what I was half-expecting. The agony was over. And our conversation was relatively normal.

Obviously, it wasn’t a magical experience or anything. I was definitely not vivacious or energetic. I was definitely not suddenly over him. But the conversation was good. We talked, and I realized that maybe Crush and I weren’t so compatible after all. We have some pretty different core values that I just couldn’t see when he was so high up on the pedestal.

We split the bill (I was a little chagrined at that—I had kind of envisioned paying for it myself). When we met, we hugged (and I was excited). When we parted, we hugged (and I was trying not to make it awkward).

And for the rest of the evening, I watched the Olympics, ordered takeout Pho, and ate ice cream with friends.

I thought about that hour and a half for most of the week. Inevitably, ex-Crush and I were awkward whenever we saw each other. I tried to embrace my humiliation and tell myself that the alternative—love-sick agony—was far worse. Humiliation, embarrassment—these are things I am familiar with. I know how to deal with these feelings.

And maybe there’s some truth to the idea that being straightforward has its benefits. Because not long after that brief, awkward, embarrassing experience, I got over ex-Crush. A week after the Date, when I saw him again, I looked candidly at his face and realized that my heart didn’t skip a beat.

And despite the fact that this was one of the hardest things I had ever done (you know, come clean with my feelings knowing that I was most likely going to be embarrassed)—I think it was the right thing to do. Obsession isn’t love, and it definitely isn’t the right way to start a relationship.

At the very least, I managed to clear my head. And now, weeks and weeks after, I remain grateful for that.

The Bathroom Dilemma

I probably haven’t mentioned this, but I go to a pretty good university. The downside to going to a pretty good university is that every building of note is super old and in dire need of renovation.

The bathroom situation, needless to say, is atrocious. Buildings will have one stall in one bathroom for one gender for one floor. If you want to use that teeny bathroom with the foggy mirrors and cracked floor between classes, well, good luck. Especially if you’re a girl. Being stuck at the door keeping it awkwardly open because you cannot lose your spot in line while there are 2 minutes before class and all you need to do is change your tampon is not my idea of fun.

So since coming to college one of my favorite past times has become discovering where the best bathrooms on campus are.

I keep this running log in my head. The checklist is:

• Lots of stalls or generally not well used
• Clean toilets
• Nice tiling
• Full length mirror (this is a huge plus)
• Well-lit
• Less than fifteen years old (as far as I can tell)

The trick is actually committing to the list. Once I’ve singled out the best bathrooms for use, I go out of my way to use those bathrooms whenever I can. If nothing else, it’s a good excuse to stop sitting around and get up (even if it means crossing campus to get to the business school).

Objectively, the best bathrooms are the big ones (like the one in the business school) because you’re nearly always guaranteed a stall and no infernal wait when you go in. But my personal favorite bathrooms are the little undiscovered ones—the ones that are exactly the same on every floor of the building (what?? A building with bathrooms for both genders on every floor??) and have one or two stalls each. If someone is using one bathroom, I just go up or down a floor and the exact same tiny cute bathroom will be there waiting for me.

You can almost—almost­—forget that it’s been weeks since you’ve used a non-public toilet. And when urination is not the order of the day, let me tell you these tiny unused bathrooms are your friends.

-Walnut

 

 

What should you major in?

A common misconception about majors is that you should be good at the thing you’re majoring in. Admittedly, that would be ideal—majoring in something that is naturally easy for you would be great for your social life, your confidence (no demoralizing reliance on “the curve”), your GPA…

But in reality there are not many people in this world built like Einstein or Beethoven or Shakespeare—so-called geniuses naturally good at one thing. Especially if that one thing is something that has a reputation for being hard.

I’m an applied math major. I am not good at math. I happen to be rather good at time management, which is not the same thing as having a deep intuitive understanding of the subject. I’m no Newton or Laplace or Ramanujan, and I know it. This might be a stretch, but I think most people are non-geniuses like me, people who won’t ever find the one subject they happen to be marvelous in.

So how do you choose a major? The obvious answer is to look at Forbes’ top 10 paying majors and choose the easiest-sounding one. But I remain an idealist: we come to college to learn something that we can’t learn on our own (I mean, presumably that’s where the tuition money is going, right?) Majoring in something just because it’s easy sounds like a cop-out to me—maybe a way to have a bomb social life, but not a way to become academically fulfilled. In my experience at my pretty good university, college students spend most of their time studying anyway. Might as well not waste that time studying something just because it’s not hard.

Anyway, here’s the textbook thesis of the post: a major should be something that you choose not because you’re good at it, but because you can still at least halfway enjoy it when you’re bad at it.

Maybe you’re lucky and the thing that happens to bring you joy is also easy for you. But I wasn’t and was deeply disturbed by the fact that I didn’t have a natural so-called passion or calling. I chose math somewhat arbitrarily, because I had given up on chemistry after discovering that lab work absolutely sucked. To my surprise, I found that I actually enjoyed talking to the wacky, insanely smart professors in the department. And I don’t mind spending all my time trying to understand some random proof.

As insurance for the future, I’ll add that we’ll see how I feel about math after I’ve struggled through Partial Differential Equations (oh GOD). But for now, I’m satisfied with my decision.

Here’s a checklist:

HOW TO KNOW IF YOU HAVE SELECTED THE CORRECT MAJOR

1. You failed a test and instead of freaking out and crying (as you did for the chemistry test) you went to office hours because, damn it, you need to know how you got that problem wrong.
2. Office hours: you think the professors are the bomb, even if/especially if nobody else seems to like them. You go to office hours. The professor knows your face.
3. You spend three to four hours getting tutored by the grad TA and instead of feeling empty and tired at the end, the fact that you finally finished the problem set makes you want to run up the top of a hill and sing.
4. You start making up dumb inside jokes about your major and get sad when none of your friends understand/care.
5. You can name at least three famous people in the field who are still alive (bonus points if one of them has taught you)
6. Thinking about what you used to want to major in makes you want to laugh.
7. Plan your future classes on a spreadsheet or something. The face you make is not a grimace.