Truth about how people should view successes and failures in life.

I recently traveled to Europe last minute because I felt like doing something I might not be able to do later in life, and also because it’s something different. No, I wasn’t looking for some life lesson, neither was I trying to follow what other people do. I really just felt like “well, why not”.

A lot of people say traveling alone could be scary. I met a Turkish guy in Bruges who told me that I’m brave. I didn’t really feel that way. But who knows, maybe I am brave. I could see how it could be scary if you are often anxious or alone; but me, no, I rarely feel either of those feelings. I’ve learned that this is one of my strengths and it’s what keeps me so strong in everything I do. Nothing can stop me and nothing can stop my optimism because I always believe I can get through anything without too many problems.

So I’d like to talk about my trip and I would like to highlight the big lessons I actually unintentionally learned along the way.

Iceland has beautiful design and is fucking expensive. That’s my conclusion for that. Beautiful design as in beautiful interior design, fashion, etc.

Amsterdam was an overall wonderful experience. The first place in Europe that I basically landed in, aside from Iceland. The architecture there is just amazing; a city full of tall buildings side by side to each other and not too orderly, some tilted, some shorter. People there are super friendly and want us (tourists) to just have a good time. Coffee shops felt a bit overrated and touristy; I had a “space cake”, that’s what they call the weed brownies there. That thing got me ridiculously high at Van Gogh Museum. I had good company, two Canadian guys, Scott and James. Riding a bike in Amsterdam is the real experience. You’re pushed to the side if you ain’t fast enough because over there, the bikes are the cars over here in California. Bikes have full reign over the streets. Red light District was ridiculous and seeing so many girls try to lure you in was unheard of. Met 3 guys who talked about how awesome it was banging one of the Ukrainian girls there. They loved it so much one of the brothers (two of them were brothers (locals), one looked hispanic) even wanted to marry her.

Brussels was lesson 1. The story goes a bit like this: It’s a cloudy day and I’m walking out of my hostel a bit past 11. There’s about half a mile distance from my hostel to the city center. As I walk towards city center, a well dressed french guy (well dressed as in Gucci Bag, matching blue sportswear outfit, and gel-ed up hair) comes up to me and asks me a cigarette. I say no and he asks me where I’m from and I say I’m from Cali (I should always say I’m Canadian from now on). He goes like “oooooh, Californiaaaaa”. He gets distracted by some homeless guy and walks away. A couple minutes later, he walks past me and turns around and asks “Do you have a cigarette?” but he then gives me the gesture that he had already asked me. Then, he asks if I like music. And out of my oblivious self, of course I said I liked music. He then goes on and begins dancing with me by hooking my arm with his arm and hooking my leg with his leg. As he does this, I get instantly suspicious and I grab my pocket. That’s when I feel his hand on my wallet. This is what’s called the “Football trick” or the “Ronaldinho”. Pickpocketers learn it in Spain and it has traveled across Europe where pickpocketers reside.

Brussels had good beer, good chocolate, and beautiful buildings. The Grand Place Town Hall was a sight. Royal Palace was as well. Two guys, Florian and David Schmoll. Honestly, the most wonderful guys I had met on this trip, so easy to talk about culture differences and so easygoing on everything. They even made me a KILO of spaghetti! Shared so many good laughs together (HALIGA SCHISSA = holy shit), I hope to keep in touch with them. Riko was also a memorable experience because she took me around Brussels for a bit, chatted about what’s great about Brussels vs Japan. A little about her relationships and how guys don’t really like her but they act like they do to get in her pants. She seems very open to hooking up and not participating in Japanese culture as much.

Bruges was lesson 2. I’ll start with the fact that girls in Bruges tend to be a bit flirty as it seems. Maybe because of it being a small town, the young locals really look to connect with anyone that comes from outside the town. Anyway, the first night, I’m hanging out with Salma and she takes me to a bar that’s basically a club. We’re outside drinking and she introduces me to all her friends. Small town, so everyone knows the beatboxer, Packo. Packo and his friends invite me to smoke with them and we sort of just chat about differences in culture and being Flemish and such. The next night was basically hanging out with the 4 guys, Simon, Billie, Joey, and Bram. They invited me to smoke as well and I offered the rest of my space cake to them (I had half left from Amsterdam). They all sort of laugh at the fact that I sucked at smoking but honestly, they just laughed at everything. They say they have a culture of laughing at everything (not sure but I’ll take it). We go to a bar and drink and party, Billie seems to really enjoy talking to me and telling me what these boys are like (their personalities). Then, they go to an old man’s house, whose name is Frederick, and they say he’s a pedophile because they watched him try to mack on a really young girl and they had to stop him and take him home. Small town, so they know where he lives. They ring his doorbell at 2 am and they’re looking to just barge in and drink his alcohol and take his stuff? I’m totally sketched out by this but I go along with it. Next, two of the guys, start fighting and it seems like they are serious, but they end up just playing it off like it’s fine. Afterwards, we get some food (Doners in Europe are amazing). As we get food, these two British guys are trying to get cocaine but we don’t have anything to offer them. This is where lesson 2 begins. These two British guys are visiting Bruges from Leicester City because of a soccer game going on between the two cities. These two guys walk up to us and say “you guys have an cocaine?”, we say no, and they say “Are you guys weird, how can you have weed but no cocaine? we’ve been on coke since we were 14″. We were so high we were just laughing at everything. Next, he asks everyone’s name but skips me. He later on asks “So what’s your name, Chang?” I reply, “Michael”. “Oh when did they start to have English names?”. His friend says “Nah, we’ll still call him Chang, Chang Michael.” Then he asks “Do you even understand what I’m saying?” And i say “I understand you perfectly”. They have a full on surprised look on their faces. That’s basically the end of the night because everything after that was just not as interesting (we visited Frederick again and Bram took me home).

London. Great hostel with really friendly hostelmates, aside from the stairs that I had to climb everyday. Hung out with Grace and Jordan, two military participants who understood a good amount about my personality, personal growth and the way I treat women. Women in London seem to me to be very forward and just go for what they want. A taxi driver told me it has to do with the culture there and how people don’t have much time and go about a lifestyle of just going for what they want and skipping all the other nonsense.

Trip back home, I met some wonderful Punjabi couple from London on the plane to Iceland. The guy even poured whiskey at the airport for me. The mom was very understanding of my liberal ideals and it was great to hear that she could relate her kids to my values in this world.

Finally, on the planeflight from Iceland to SFO, it was Alicia and Adam, the couple from Santa Cruz who had just had a baby called Beckett. Really taught me about how to love a child to its fullest and having both parents really onboard on everything.

That’s a breakdown of my trip in a jiffie. “In Bruges” is the name of this post because people know Bruges for the movie and Bruges was one of the more memorable cities on this trip even though Amsterdam was probably the best city I visited this time. Next time, Vienna and Prague.

Hey blog,

It’s funny, I created this blog such a long time ago thinking this would be my life diary for a long while, but somewhere along the way, it died. Pretty sure it was sometime in college. 

This post is called revive because of my attempts to revive this blog; i’ve revived it like 10 times now and it seems to never work. But everytime I revive it, it’s an update on my life.

So, I really don’t know where to start in this past year but I’ll give it a shot and try to finish it off as to why I’m writing right now.

During the end of my previous college career, I really was wasting my life away. Being blessed as a young healthy individual with a strong financial background, I’ve never really thought about my career as an important aspect of my life. Until this year. Nothing financially changed in my family, but it was the decision to make my own money and support myself. Long story short, I realized my parents liked to really use money as a threat for making me do things their way. Their defense to every argument is, if you don’t want to do <insert action here>, then go support yourself and live on your own. I realized that many parents, not just mine, use that as a threat. It’s fair, really. Nobody likes to be wrong and it’s such an accessible threat. It’s what lead me to conclude that independence is such an important growth process in a person’s life. If you never gain true independence, you’ll never have the ability to do what you want to do and instead be always under the influence of your parents or anyone else, for that matter. 

And that leads to relationships: relationships, in my opinion, are apart of independence. You choose who you love and you choose who to spend your time with. However, once you indulge yourself into the relationship, it isn’t independence anymore. It’s being independent together and slowly building a dependence on each other. One thing I’ve learned to accept is that everyone needs help. It’s really hard to get through life witout it. From a baby, you’re dependent of your parents and after that process and you leave your home, it’s learning how to be independent but also being able to depend on someone when you need it. 

I don’t really know if that makes sense but I’m in a realtionship right now, and it’s something the both of us are learning about. Being independent together but learning when to depend on each other. It’s what I think makes up a part of love. Knowing you could depend on each other and not feel judged by one another.

With all of the previous theories in mind, it’s what leads me here today to write about my life. I’m in conflict with my parents and it’s a struggle to decide if I should completely break off from my family and build my own life or to still be integrated within theirs. I’m a family-oriented guy, at least I think I am, and yet there are too many conflicts to even fathom continuing to live with them. 

I wonder if, even though I know i’m not wrong, and my parents think I’m blatantly wrong, if I should still apologize for something I don’t think I did wrong. In my upbringing, that is what should be done because children need to listen to the “wiser” parents, especially because they raised you. Their struggle raising you is just a pity when you grow up only to make them more angry. So i wonder if I should just give in for my parent’s sake, or should I leave and show to them that I can do things my way and still make it in life. Either way is good for them but the latter will definitely bring them more unhappiness and it just makes me feel anxious of the possible regret I could have with my parents if it ruins their health or lives (especially knowing that asian parents care for their kids so much). 

I’m a software developer now. Never would’ve thought I would end up here. Studied neuroscience, only to find out I had no idea what I wanted in life. Led me think my future would be intertwined with my parents and that’s okay. 

To those of you in school, if you don’t know for a fact what you want to do in life and what sort of impact you want to make in society, take a year off and work/travel in different places. You’ll definitely get perspective and much more motivation to study what you want to do in life. Studying won’t feel like such a pain, it’ll feel like progress. It’ll feel like flying to your destination. It wont be what you think it is; all you need is perspective.

Don’t follow your passion

First things first. This trip was kinda bomb.
Trip to Tijuana, spontaneous and sorta scary at the same time.
Really didn’t plan anything but just decided to go to a random land in which we could not communicate in.
We arrive through the Mexican border and it pretty much is just a couple Mexican soldiers standing there. HUGE difference from the American border to the Mexican border. One land is developed and one is obviously not. The prices drop in a matter of 100 yards, from San ysidro to Tijuana.
We taxi to revolucion and check out the tourist attraction (we got ripped off, shoulda been $4) and not 5 for the taxi. The tourist attraction place was full of hustlers and pretty much a shopping plaza. There were tacos, sit down bars, plenty of mini shops and fcking loud ass live music. We ate some tacos and he bill only came out 5$ per person which was so surprising. The service was great and our server Gary was super thankful of our generous tipping.
Afterwards, we walk down the road and look around, and looked around the artistic walls and alleys and public day life in Tijuana. Got some ice cream drinks, got tijuana’s tacos el gourdo, and was told that their red light district is near and is full of amigas.
Red light district was unfuckingbelievable. Hookers just on the street hanging out all over. It reminded me of the game grand theft auto but in real life. The girls wouldn’t hustle but they would stand there looking pretty, guys walk up to them, they would act all reluctant to say yes to the guy but then give in for the money and business.

Next, was the business district. We watched “maleificient” for 4 dollars in a very modern looking theater. Afterwards, bars and drinks; we get drinks at the local bar and their drinks were literally on fire. Then we go clubbing. First club we went was sorta empty and small with a lot of Mexican music. The second one on the other hand, was two stories with two live bands and played electro music. There were a lot of people dancing and people all over the tables drinking and socializing. Two girls approach us and call us puto and they kinda try to dance with us but we like not really interested hahah and one of the girls was married so it didn’t make sense to us.
Sorta get hungry so we decide to just get some tacos outside and they’re cheap as hell so we sit down and eat them adobada and crane asada tacos.
Next was strip clubs. Biggest difference of my life.

To be continued

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

– Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

After all, we are all just but one spec of a pixel in the universe. Treasure it, as this is the one and only home that we know of. 

Hi, I’ve decided to restart the blog i created in my junior year of high school. holy damn, this blog is already 6 years old. time really flies.

Renewed passion for programming. i know, it never was something that I thought I’d do but I’ve always had a burning desire to do things with computers and hack them. I like technology and that’s that. 

I’ve gotten several offers for jobs and internships already which is good news. When I was in Physiology and neuroscience in the past 3 years of my life, I realized that I wasn’t going anywhere I wanted and wasn’t motivated to find jobs and opportunities to grow. Here though, there are so many more options and I only been learning programming for some months and I’m already getting offers. It’s overwhelming how strong the software field is in terms of jobs. Not to mention having a home in the bay area doesn’t hurt. Someone once said, the software field right now is one of the most over-rewarded fields of all time. Some idea gets thrown out and someone makes an iOS app and venture capitalists are like OMG i’ll give you 200k to build it into a company. 

Programming just stimulates a part of my creative mind and I need that. I’ve always been a much more creative person with all the “collecting and hoarding things” all my life: rocks, batteries, flyers, cameras, etc. And playing with photography, singing, dancing, and more.

I’ve just always thought nah, i’m not an engineer, i’m not nerdy, i won’t be good enough to be a doctor. Honestly, yeah if I were a sociologist, that would be my ideal career: talking and analyzing life and society, but it’s not a demanding career. My parents have always been pressuring me to work towards a career with opportunities and I understand that but they also didn’t let me do what I wanted to do which I can’t blame them for but I regret not making my own decisions earlier. Instead, I was scared to switch out majors or else my dad wouldn’t support me throughout school. Asian parents pressure. And so I went towards doing something I didn’t like. Also, when i went to college, I didn’t even really care about my career but rather just cared about “living life” and now that’s kicking me in the ass.
Pretty much, I wanted to do psychology when I first started college and my parents legitly didn’t let that go. “what’re you going to do when you come out?” shit like that. And then my counselor said to think about “cognitive science” which NOW is an awesome major I totally could’ve done. But no, parents said they’ve never even heard of that major. They are the wiser ones in the end so they'e just trying to help me choose the right decisions. But in the end, it sets me back more because I feel like I’m choosing things for them rather for me. 

And so it came down to neuroscience, that was the closest to what I wanted to do. But it was biology and science based which I knew would be super hard but I went for it knowing that. They were okay with it and after mentioning it to their friends about my neuroscience major, they became all proud of me cuz their friends all thought it was such a good choice. That pride added to my fear of disappointment from my parents. And my amount of care for my parents’ opinions stems from the amount of decisions and things they took care for me. I never had to worry, my parents would pretty much do everything for me, including even my SAT’s. 
Few few years of college were a breeze and I never really had to study. And simply put, I never expected what was coming. The more I got lazy, the more it set me back. and when upper division science classes came along, I ACTUALLY needed to study and boom, I was stuck. I wasn’t doing well in my classes but I didn’t want to switch my major because I never wanted to make that decision without my parents’ approval. 

Then my friend told me something PPL just needed to tell me. “I need to make my own decisions for myself”. I pretty much did a lotta thing highly influenced from my parents. From girls to school; I chose girls that I knew my “mom” would approve of because I didn’t want to go through the nightmare of a relationship my previous one was. And so, i chose a girl with a full family, asian, going to good school, etc. But was that what i wanted? not really. I also wanted to date white girls, hispanic girls, girls that were in the arts, etc. And so pretty much for the important things in life, careers & relationships, my parents sorta restricted a part of me. I’m glad they’re slowly learning to let go of that after my realization of my identity flaws. 

I said all this because it got me here, where I’m about to graduate with a neuroscience degree but I don’t want to do anything much in my biology-related field, I can’t stand my classes, it’s too late for me to switch majors and there are barely any job opportunities for me with my experience. Majors don’t even matter that much when you go into the workforce. Majority of people go into other fields that they didn’t even study. As cliche as it will sound, the lesson to anyone who still reads this blog, pursue what you love. Even if you don’t know, try everything. From rock climbing to programming to blog posting. If you pursue elsewhere, you’re just going to waste your time because you’re unhappy and you’ll want to give up everyday in your life rather than want to live everyday. Everyone wants to be happy, and you’ll attain that in your career if you’re motivated in what you love doing and you’re working with people that love doing what you do. It becomes much easier. Happiness is a choice; you can always choose to be happy for any situation and in this case, choose to go for what makes you frequently happy. Til next time.

for everything he says, amen. so much truth, said in such great articulation. it’s not about the fantasies, it’s about the grind if you want to get what you want. it’s about accepting the minefield of society and working your way up, then being a role model for society. don’t victimize yourself and give excuses to be lazy and be “real”. some people are special and you can’t always be them.

random day where i just felt like crap. dunno why. i feel more and more stressed and the more stress, the less i want to work. i’ve gotta just push through this year and i should be good. just like this blog’s name, i’m going to stick to what i know…being optimistic. keep it up, michael

Why do we do what we do: It’s about your decisions that shape your destiny that shapes your resources; it’s not lack of resources but rather resourcefulness. Passion, creativity, curiosity, love, etc. Certainty & uncertainty, self-significance, love/connection, giving.