Hello! After the last two ‘serious posts,’ I figured it was time to give a personal update again. A lot has happened over the last ~two months, so as usual, this will be a rambling and poorly structured post. I’ll start by griping about school and then transition to more interesting content – sorry for the negative rant, but school is 31% of my awake hours, so it takes up a proportionate share of my update.
The first major development is that I am now in the second semester of my senior year (12th grade) of high school, which is great news because I have no obligations or stress during this time. Colleges don’t consider second semester grades for admission, and they don’t rescind an admissions offer unless you’re failing half your classes or get suspended for trying to set a toilet on fire. You can easily figure out a class is populated by 12th graders by counting how many are asleep, playing video games, or watching Youtube. As a result, I’ve got a bit more free time during school hours now, which I’m devoting to reading and studying languages.
However, I’m a ‘quasi-senior’ because I’m early graduating; half my courses are full of 12th graders, the other half full of 11th graders. While 12th graders have finished college applications and are now sleeping through classes, 11th graders are doing the exact opposite, averaging 4 hours of sleep every night because they’re just about to start college applications. Given that I exist between these worlds, I see a morbidly funny dichotomy between apathy and over-work, alternating every 90 minutes as I change classes. I’m getting a kind of ‘half-senior, half-junior (11th grade)’ experience where I spend half the day relaxing in senior-majority classes and the other half enduring a barrage of tests in junior-majority classes. While it is better than the fully stressful junior experience sans early graduation, it still is a bit frustrating to be deprived of the full luxury experience.
The lack of stress is also something that I’m paradoxically conflicted about. While it is nice to enjoy my own books at school, all this free time exacerbates my previous irritation with having to attend high school; if I’m going to spend these 8 hours reading my own stuff, why did I have to show up here at all? I spend half the day reading “China After Mao” and studying Indonesian, and I spend the other half trying to tune out lectures and race through tests that no longer matter because I’m in the second semester. The sheer pointlessness of the second semester is a bit infuriating, like a kind of spiritual prison. My life is put on pause, and I’m unable to advance in my main career progression through college courses that will actually serve a purpose in my life; instead, I’m just killing time, waiting to leave 12th grade and enter college where my courses (and the 8 hours they occupy) actually contribute to my life. Something feels wrong about condemning kids to 8 hours of school when the courses and exams no longer matter, and the only reason for showing up is to get marked on the attendance sheet and keep grades above a 70 to prevent admissions offers being rescinded.
School is doubly frustrating for me because I’ve really started to dislike the culture here. A lot of people enjoy senior year because it’s more time to hang out with their friends, but I have no strong friendships at school. I occasionally had good conversations with other juniors last year, but since they’re all busy prepping for college applications, I’m increasingly deprived of even these chance encounters. Leaving aside those rare kids who are fun to talk to, most of the conversations at school consist of inane brainrot (67 and skibidi toilet), exchanging information about tests (technically not allowed but academic integrity is a joke), or gossiping. Since none of these interest me much, I’ve been left without much of a social life.
There’s a lot of other stuff I dislike about the school, the classes, and the kids here, but I’m omitting it to avoid the risk of sounding like a misanthropic crybaby. The social life problems are probably my fault to some extent, so I don’t want to sound completely insane by rambling on about that for several paragraphs. I’ll summarize all of that ranting with a quick “I hate this place and can’t wait to get out of here.”
With that update on school out of the way, onto more interesting things!
Outside of loneliness and frustration with school’s pointlessness, my life has been going pretty well. I’ve finished three amazing books this month, thanks in part due to the extra reading time at school. They are “The Jakarta Method” by Vincent Bevins, “We Do Not Part” by Han Kang, and “From Heaven Lake” by Vikram Seth. I hope to finish book reviews for all of them in the next few days and post them on my blog, so I’ll abstain from yapping about them here and save my thoughts for those posts.
I’ve now started Frank Dikötter’s “China After Mao,” which I’m already loving. This book is a history of China after Mao (surprise) from 1976 to 2012, focusing on political and economic transformations. I’ve been drawn in by the level of detail and the complexity of the narrative he presents; rather than framing it as a well-calculated rise to being a superpower, Dikötter portrays China’s rise as being chaotic, prone to frequent halts, and plagued by a failure to bring about true political or economic liberalization. After finishing just the first chapter, I feel delightfully overwhelmed by information; the political machinations of the Politburo members and the disastrous pendulum of economic policy create reading that’s both informative and entertaining.
If you want a month-by-month replay of the events leading up to and following Deng Xiaoping’s rehabilitation in 1977, this is the book for you. If you want a riveting story of seesawing between centralized control of the economy and devolution of planning powers, with the chaos that it created, this is the book for you. If you want to learn about how flattery of American diplomats, vying for ‘Most Favoured Nation’ status with the US, and other diplomatic intrigue shaped our world today, this is the book for you. If you just want to learn a ton about post-Mao China and engage with interesting ideas, this is the book for you.
I’ve also been working on learning more Indonesian, Spanish, and Bengali, and I’ve started again trying to learn Mandarin. The juggling of so many projects likely limits my progress in each of them, but I don’t really care since I’m doing this for fun and am enjoying myself a lot. I also have enough time that multitasking hasn’t significantly limited me, so I’m satisfied with my current pace of progress.
In Indonesian and Mandarin, I’m learning from the ground up and just starting to form basic sentences, but I’m able to consume more interesting content in Spanish and Bengali due to my higher degree of fluency. I’m technically already ‘fluent’ in Bengali, but I can only speak in an informal register and I lapse into English when discussing complex topics. I’ve therefore started pushing myself to learn the more formal vocabulary and am now reading Bengali newspapers like Prothom Alo that use complex language: great for learning Bangla and also for following the news. In addition to formal vocabulary, my reading of Prothom Alo and Kazi Nazrul Islam’s poetry is letting me learn vocabulary that’s rarely used in West Bengal but ubiquitous in Bangladesh. I’ve learned a lot over the last few weeks, and it’s been very satisfying.
To further my learning of Spanish, I’ve begun reading El País and 2666 (amazing book) with a lot more vigor. I want to highlight this article as an especially interesting El País story based on a series of interviews with Gabriel Boric. Boric is, to my mind, one of the most inspiring politicians of our times (coherent and logical when speaking, as president he crushed inflation while also raising minimum wage, introducing 40 hour work-week, and reforming pension system), and I liked reading his reflections on politics and also learning about his various niche interests – turns out the president of Chile is a fan of both Radiohead and K-pop, in addition to a bunch of other things you wouldn’t typically associate with a president. That article has lots of fun Boric trivia while also presenting interesting ideas on the future of the left and how it can fight the rising tide of far-right politics.
I’ve also finished Part 2 (the part about Amalfitano) of 2666 and am really enjoying Part 3! Bolaño writes really well and, more than directly saying anything, his book is good at creating a feeling of dread and horror around a place, and conveying the book’s themes through that characterization. Another super interesting bit of Spanish media is the 3-part documentary “La Batalla de Chile (The Battle of Chile) directed by Patricio Guzmán. The movie covers the events leading up to the 1973 military coup in Chile and the battle between”Poder Popular” (people’s power) and fascism. It’s a devastating film showing how collusion between wealthy businessmen, the Chilean military, and the CIA led to a bloody coup and the destruction of a country’s collective dreams. More full review coming in a blog post soon (maybe?).
For those curious about my STEM pursuits, I’ve taken a small hiatus, in part due to burnout; turns out it eventually gets a bit tiring to spend three-ish years studying college-level math, physics, and computer science without support from anyone around you! I still love these subjects, but they require perseverance and energy that I just can’t muster right now. So for the next few months at least, I will not be studying physics or math with the same vigor I used to. That shouldn’t decrease the amount of content on my blog though, since I’m still engaging with plenty of interesting ideas in other fields. Speaking of the blog, this ‘second semester free time boost’ will hopefully also let me write here more often; look forward to that!
That mostly sums up recent happenings. If the meteorological gods are reading this, thanks for the snow; missing four days of school is the best thing to have happened in a while. As always, feel free to contact me if you have anything interesting to say (about page has email+Discord). Farewell until the next post!